


Interrogatives?—Season 4

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Interrogatives? [4]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Feels, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 20,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29420847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season.
Relationships: Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Jenny O'Malley Ryan/Kevin Ryan, Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Interrogatives? [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096184
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	1. Taxing—Rise (4 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He Is exhausting. This is the thought at the center of her mind on the third day as she sits on the edge of her bed and wonders if she has the strength to lower herself into it. It’s an unkind thought. It’s untrue. She knows this in the not center of her mind, but those thoughts swim somewhere out along the periphery, and she is undeniably exhausted, on this, the third day. That must come down to him. 

  
_“_ _So how does it feel?”  
_ _— Richard Castle, Rise (4 x 01)_

* * *

He Is exhausting. This is the thought at the center of her mind on the third day as she sits on the edge of her bed and wonders if she has the strength to lower herself into it. It’s an unkind thought. It’s untrue. She knows this in the _not_ center of her mind, but those thoughts swim somewhere out along the periphery, and she is undeniably exhausted, on this, the third day. That must come down to him. 

She does, eventually, have the strength to lower herself into the bed. She has the strength to breathe through the pain that comes with any ambitious shift in position. He is exhausting. That is her mantra. 

She laughs about it, a little—as much as her throbbing ribs, spine, bones she had long believed to be fabrications of television medical dramas and shady chiropractors will allow her. She chuckles through gritted teeth at the thought that he would love to know that he is the center of her attention, that she is breathing through the pain by cursing his name. 

The pain ebbs outward, not so much in waves as in door-slamming bursts. The worst of it ebbs, leaving her with enough mental space to take inventory. She contemplates some of the lesser fiends that have taken up residence in the various parts of her body. 

Her arms ache, wrist to shoulder. That’s the firing range, certainly. That is the recoil of a gun that is not hers making itself at home in every one of her joints. But it’s more than the range. Her deltoids burn at the slightest provocation. Her triceps are eager to remind her of their existence, and there are more tiny muscles win heaven and earth, Horatio, et cetera, et cetera. 

None of that is the range. That’s the curling iron, the blow dryer. It’s the makeup brush and the godforsaken effort it takes now to pull on a top that touches her body, to shrug her decrepit way into a close-fitting moto jacket. That is the toll the performance has taken on her over one, two, three days. 

He is exhausting. 

The thought, unkind and untrue, pulses once again in the center of her mind. But even the burden of pains new and ancient won’t quite let her get away with this. 

He has objectively _not_ been exhausting over these last three days. There have been no antics, nor has he made a point of pushing any particular buttons. With the exception of their mortifying, hissed exchange on a bustling Manhattan street, he has been measured and low key. He has been subdued, even in his earnest plea for her to step back from her mom’s case for the moment. Even in his earnest plea for her to pick up her life again and live it, he has been subdued. 

This—these new aches and this new set of twinges dancing a tarantella on every nerve—she has brought on herself in donning her armor again, taking up her sword and shield, and the pain is worth it. 

It is worth it for the satisfaction of shoving a perfect target back at the interloper who has been installed behind Roy Montgomery’s desk. It is worth it for the peace she sees on the faces of Sonya Gilbert’s family, the relief on Dale Landers’ at his rightful liberation. 

It is worth it for the feel of the coffee cup he hands her warming her palm, soothing the aching joints of her wrist. It is more than worth it for the flash of surprise—of desire—on his face in the instant before his anger came roaring to the forefront. 

It is worth it for the chance to work alongside him in more ways than one. Because she believes him when he says _just not today._ She values the fact that he is as committed to the day-in, day-out work as she is, 

Her perfect target is about him, as is the peace on the face of her victim’s family, the relief on the face of a man, rightfully exonerated. Her armor, her sword and shield—they are about her and for her. They are are necessary to her sense of self, and as she is learning with her shoes slipped off and her feet tucked up—as she is learning with scalding tears streaking her face for fifty minutes at a clip—so is he. 

She lifts her arms and breathes through the burn of weary muscles—muscles wearied. She presses her hands to the warm sensation of sleep spreading out from the center of her. And the last thought in the center of her mind, the one that curves the corners of her mouth upward, is the truth—he really is exhausting. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: No things. Things are still at large. 


	2. Up in the Sky—Heroes and Villains (4 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels like they are leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Together, they are leaping. He doesn’t understand it. He’s not inclined to question it—he’d be the last person on earth to look gift superpowers in the mouth, let alone superpowers shared jointly with her—but he doesn’t quite understand what it is that has moved the needle, and moved it so dramatically. He only knows they are leaping. 

> _What do you think, mutant powers or years of training?”  
>  — Kate Beckett, Heroes and Villains (4 x 02)_

* * *

He feels like they are leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Together, they are leaping. He doesn’t understand it. He’s not inclined to _question_ it—he’d be the last person on earth to look gift superpowers in the mouth, let alone superpowers shared jointly with her—but he doesn’t quite understand what it is that has moved the needle, and moved it so dramatically. He only knows they are leaping. 

She is suddenly playful with him. She has openly gawped at his _Avengers_ #1 and let him get away with an invitation to peruse his issues at her leisure. She has tweaked him about how obvious his choice of superhero doppelgänger is, and she’s been every bit as brazen about it as she would have been six, seven, eight months ago—back when they could flirt at will and each produce a significant other to show it was harmless. 

It’s striking. It seems to happen in such all-at-once fashion that an abrupt, terrible paranoia sets in that she has a significant other she could produce, and maybe it’s not _him_ she’s leaping with. Maybe Josh has returned. Maybe there’s a baker’s dozen of Josh substitutes in her life, and he has, once again, become irrelevant enough that playfulness and faux flirting are on the table. It’s a terrible, _painful_ paranoia, though it’s mercifully short-lived. 

There’s too much evidence to the contrary for it _not_ to be short-lived. She’s brittle on his behalf with Gates, and softly pleading with him to play it safe, take it down a notch. She is, from beginning to end of the whole Lone Vengeance saga, surprisingly—and … across-the-board—open with him. It’s not that she’s wearing her heart on her sleeve exactly, though he keeps a sharp eye out for it. 

But she listens to his woes when it comes to his daughter’s impending flight from the nest, but she kicks his ass about it in a matter-of-fact way that feels new. She declines to elaborate on how she “knows” Ann Hastings is innocent, but far from getting defensive or turning away, she faces him and leaves it at _I just know_ —a declaration that, not seven months ago, she’d taken him to task for making about Damien Westlake. She makes a point of looking at him when she says it, of acknowledging the painful bit of shared history and showing him that he is at least partly responsible for a pretty seismic shift in her. 

On the other end of the spectrum, she now seems to be the queen of the amused, scandalized, exasperated sidelong glance as Tyler Faris’s mother rolls a cigarette between her fingers and notes they’re going to need a bigger pad if they want to have a hope in hell of cataloguing her son’s enemies. She peeks at him from beneath the hand she’s using to shield her eyes from the sudden, unwelcome sight of Tony Valtini dropping trou. She catches his eye, again and again, and he knows—he just _knows_ —that they are newly in this together. 

It’s a novel reality that’s nearly as terrifying as it is exhilarating. He is giddy with joy over the view from the heights they’re ascending to, but in between those many moments, there’s fear. 

He is afraid to hope. To the marrow of his bones, he is _afraid,_ though no one can be as surprised as he is to realize that it’s fear that’s left now that most of his anger has ebbed away. Most of it. 

Those silent months without her cut deep. They surgically excised some portion of his fundamentally optimistic nature and left in its place a kind of jaded cynicism he has only ever played for effect before, and that is inclined to pipe up. It is inclined to make him mistrust her and to hate himself for the secret he is keeping. That jaded cynicism is inclined to hiss that this—all of this—is contingent on the very thing it is now his sworn duty to keep her from doing. 

And it’s true. That impossible tension is at least as true as the playful flirting, the vulnerability, all of it.

He doesn’t know what to do with that. There seems to be no viable course of action, given that Catch-22. It brings him back to earth with a thump. She doesn’t though. She refuses to. He looks to the sky, he watches her new way of moving through the world—how tentative, yet determined it is—and he feels irrevocably grounded. 

But she leaps once more—a tall, tall building this time—and she tugs him along. The two of them watch Ann Hastings and Paul Whittaker depart the scene. The young cop and the journalist/wannabe Stan Lee do look, for wall the world, like the two of them—or some multiverse iteration of Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook, anyway.

It’s a warm, rewarding moment that turns suddenly electric, suddenly alarming as Ann Hastings lays a hungry kiss on Paul Whittaker. He feels the blood creeping up the back of his neck. He turns to her with some kind of chaotic apology on his lips. But she’s looking at him sidelong with a knowing, conspiratorial, _yearning_ grin on her face. And they are, together, leaping tall buildings in how ever many bounds it takes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: My leaps are not even a thing; I am stuck to the ground


	3. Love, Death, and Robots—Head Case (4 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death is not a process for her. It sounds obvious on the surface, given her profession. She’s a homicide cop. For her, death is brutal, instantaneous, past tense. 

> _“What does your love life have to do with any of this?”_   
>  _— Javier Esposito, Head Case (4 x 03)_

* * *

Death is not a process for her. It sounds obvious on the surface, given her profession. She’s a homicide cop. For her, death is brutal, instantaneous, past tense. 

But it’s not simply professional, of course. Death—her concept of death—is profoundly shaped by her mother’s murder. She remembers death as a process. She remembers the slow, painful decline of her grandfather, and far more distantly, the way her dad’s nursing home–bound mother slipped away when she was a small child. 

She has, like file folders tucked away in a cabinet, those experiences—those memories, though they feel like they belong to someone else—of death as a drawn-out thing. But since that night, that phone call, that sharp, sudden loss, death has not been a process for her. 

It’s becoming one again. The possibility of death as a process is taking up residence in her busy, overcrowded, tangled-up mind as she sits with her knees drawn up in a leather chair that might be big enough to swallow her whole. 

She’s gotten used to the idea in that context, as much as it’s possible to get used to any such thing. She has spent late afternoons and ultra-early mornings extracting the admission from herself that, yes, she spent long stretches of her months away feeling as though she was dying. She faces herself in the mirror some mornings when the physical pain is bad and the clanging anxiety is worse and she admits that she still feels like she’s dying sometimes. She has committed herself to taking a deep, therapy-driven—if not necessarily therapeutic—dive into the concept of death as a process. 

The murder of Lester Hamilton throws her for a loop, though. She is not prepared, equipped, or at all enthused do be suddenly facing death as a matter of opinion. She looks at Ari Weiss and sees a charlatan. She looks at the horror show of faces standing upright in their space-age pods, staring through glass into nothing, and she sees the fools who’ve fallen for his con. 

Then she meets Cynthia Hamilton and she doesn’t know what she sees. She doesn’t know how to make sense of a woman who appears to be articulate, intelligent, and otherwise in her right mind who sees death not just as a process, but one that can be slowed indefinitely. She is at al loss until the woman, her voice thick with grief and loss, speaks of the husband she does not believe is lost to her. She speaks of his love—undying in the literal sense—and a veil lifts. 

She stares down at her lap, at her own hands as the world and everything in it shifts. She feels the weight of his presence next to her, though. She feels the tug of a glance not exchanged, and she has no thought more profound than _Oh. Oh, that’s it._

It’s ridiculous that she, in her fractured understanding, has never factored love into the equation in this way. She has been so long in the habit of thinking of love as something struck down, cut short, terminally interrupted. Love eternal, love everlasting—these are not new ideas to her. They’re simply alien, and _… Oh._

It’s painful, this bright world in which a veil has lifted. It rings her anxiety like a dinner bell to contemplate that depth of feeling and the profundity of loss that must come with it. But it makes her giddy, too. The possibility of it sets her insides soaring, and things get silly. 

They journey to the slick halls of Beau Randolph’s disposable version of eternal youth, and it’s obvious—it’s _so_ obvious—that they’ve both been profoundly changed the solemn, heartbreaking, revelatory conversation with Cynthia Hamilton. He talks boldly—openly—about ten years from now. He tells a futuristic story that emphatically features a _them_. She shimmies her shoulders and denies the need for implants, just to see how hard she can make him blush. 

They dip their respective toes in the concept of eternity, and it’s silly, then sobering when the true circumstances of Lester Hamilton’s death are revealed, when Cynthia Hamilton’s last choice on earth is to begin the journey to join him. 

Death is still not a process for her. She is a homicide cop. She is Johanna Beckett’s daughter. An abrupt, brutal end will always be her working model—the set of assumptions her mind will always reach for. 

But a veil has lifted, and even in the world where death is a moment, she now how it’s all mixed up with love. It’s bright, and it’s painful, but her toes tingle, her heart races. She doesn’t feel like she’s dying today and it is—all of it—all mixed up with love. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Recycled class preparation—not a thing. 


	4. Sororal—Kick the Ballistics (4 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks she would have been a really good big sister. The thought occurs to him like some kind of life line just when he is inclined to drown. Ballistics are in. It was Ryan’s gun that killed Jane Herzfeld. It was him and his too-late realization—He’s the real triple killer—that killed Jane Herzfeld. 

> _“You reach the next of kin?”_   
>  _— Kevin Ryan, Kick the Ballistics (4 x 04)_

* * *

He thinks she would have been a really good big sister. The thought occurs to him like some kind of life line just when he is inclined to drown. Ballistics are in. It was Ryan’s gun that killed Jane Herzfeld. It was him and his too-late realization— _He’s the real triple killer—_ that killed Jane Herzfeld. 

That’s his rapid-fire internal monologue. Hers isn’t exactly words. Hers is rage and sudden savage motion she can ill afford, given the fact that reaching for a coffee cup is a challenge. He’s drowning in his own guilt, magnified by the gut-wrenching sympathy he feels for Ryan, and the life line that his mind reaches out for, desperately, is the thought that she would hav been a really good big sister. 

It has staying power. Most her-related thoughts do, but this one is curious, given the circumstances, given all the guilt and self-loathing he really ought to be getting a jump on right about now. But she goes in with Ryan to face Captain Definitely A Terrible Big Sister, and he can’t help wondering if she might actually beat the Captain up for being mean to her little brother. 

His fantasy scenario is unlikely, he knows. She goes in with Ryan, because it’s a boss thing, not an impending sister rumble. She is technically Ryan’s supervisor, but he peeks through the blinds and takes in her slouch-and-glower approach. He can tell that she’s jumping in at every turn. She’s standing up for Ryan, and it’s more than a boss thing. It’s sweet and it’s tough and it’s clear to him that she would have kicked ass as a big sister. 

He wonders why he’s never before wondered how she wound up an only child. He thinks of the photos of her parents that he’s managed to sneak a peak at the times he’s been to her apartment. There’s a look of anticipation in each one, and a look of fulfillment later when little Katie comes along. They look in love with one another and positively smitten by their daughter. They look game for the challenge of parenthood, and he wonders. 

They’ve kicked around their only-child stories on stakeouts and over drinks. They’ve laughed at Kevin’s stories of his big sisters’ antics and shared sly, quiet looks, because it was lonely sometimes, each of them on their own, but most of the time it wasn’t, and any longing either one of them had for a sibling was a fleeting thing. 

He relishes that shared bit of understanding. He’s wondered on and off in the course of his life if the fact that he didn’t spend his tender years yearning for a sibling means he’s cold or something. Knowing she didn’t either is like a secret handshake between them. 

But watching her now makes him think that whether she yearned or didn’t, her sibling-less state is a waste of some serious big sister chops. He watches her move quickly through her own rage and frustration and focus on Ryan and what he needs. He stands in awe of her _utterly bored_ play on the first go-around with Gates, and the sheer _hutzpah_ of her door slam on the second. 

He clings to the fringes of things in the wake of Carver in all his dirtbag glory, and he marvels at her sugar-bowl fu, as she hears Ryan out, but declines to let him wallow. He has … complicated feelings about her schoolmarm-ish scolding of the boys when they raid the lost and found and go under cover as extras in some kind of sub–B eighties movie—Beckett scolding usually provokes other thoughts of a not really sisterly nature. He takes in the total package and it touches him. It charms him and makes him throw his hands up to the sky, because big-sistering is another thing she seems to be, by nature, perfect at. 

He tells her so, almost on a whim. The scotch buzzes through him. It’s a pleasant warmth that reminds him he hasn’t eaten much the last couple of days. It wants to remind him that this whole detour into appreciating her big sister qualities was a life line in the first place—a distraction from all he has to feel terrible about. And they might have found Jane Herzfeld’s killer, they might have recovered Ryan’s gun, but he still has plenty to regret. 

But he brushes it aside. He tells himself there’ll be plenty of time to wallow In his ineptitude later. Right now, he wants to celebrate her. 

“You would have been a great big sister,” he blurts and wishes there were more scotch than there actually had been. 

“You think so?” she asks, and it’s genuinely a question. It’s surprisingly earnest. 

“I know so.” He fiddles with his cup, not feeling at all like his usual, suave, compliment-paying self. “Kind. Tough. Bossy—“ 

“Hey!” Her foot shoots out.

“A real scrapper.” He dances sideways to avoid the kick. He risks sticking his tongue out at her. Her fist shoots out toward his biceps, but she pulls the punch with a narrow-eyed look that turns shy and uncertain. 

“You really think so?” she asks again. He nods. She looks up at him with a relieved, conspiratorial smile on her face. “Good to know. I was totally faking it.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Fake things. Not things. 


	5. Infantine—Eye of the Beholder (4 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She never had to worry about being a grown-up before him. She wants to kick him hard in the shins for reducing her to someone who has to worry about being a grown up. And the overwhelming desire to kick shins is probably a tick in the Not A Grown Up column. So is the conviction that she caught the Not A Grown Up cooties from him in the first place. 

> _“_ _Are you sure he’s your guy?”  
> _ _— Falco (William Holt), Eye of the Beholder (4 x 05)_

* * *

She never had to worry about being a grown-up before him. She wants to kick him hard in the shins for reducing her to someone who has to worry about being a grown up. And the overwhelming desire to kick shins is probably a tick in the _Not A Grown Up_ column. So is the conviction that she caught the _Not A Grown Up_ cooties from him in the first place. 

She did, though. She’s caught all manner of childishness from him over the years. She has scowled from afar as he and the boys play task-chair basketball, with its infinite rules and every garbage can in the bullpen set up around the perimeter in a ring of infinite goals. She has joined in task-chair basketball and added her own gonzo rules into the mix. 

She has let herself get roped into truly pointless conversations about giant Japanese robot shows on fuzzy UHF channels and cartoon dogs. She has stayed up way, way past her bedtime arguing with him about cartoon dogs and whether different-colored gummy bears actually taste different or the color just tricks your brain into _thinking_ they taste different. She has stayed up way, _way_ past her bedtime when the talk turned to candy corn and whether the brown ones have a vague chocolate taste or not. 

She has pulled pranks and had pranks—fewer and of inferior quality, of course—pulled on her. She sometimes has to remove pockets full of crumpled-up post-it notes from the precinct under cover of darkness so that neither he nor anyone else will ever know that she drafts and revises and revises again the best of the insults she delivers with devastating force and a carefully cultivated off-the-cuff delivery that she may or may not practice in the locker room mirror occasionally. She doesn’t _actually_ burn the post-its to destroy the evidence, but the thought crosses her mind every single time. 

That’s what he does to her. That’s what he does _for_ her. As she sits at her desk, worrying about being a grown-up, she suddenly misses the Captain—the _real_ Captain—fiercely. She hears his voice and feels the phantom burn of the whisky from his flask— _you weren’t having any fun before he came along._

It’s true, and it’s no more than she herself had said a scant year before the Captain’s declaration: He makes a hard job a little more fun with his gadgets and his antics and his comprehensive knowledge of the _Dungeons & Dragons _cartoon from the eighties. But it’s not his _Not A Grown Up_ cooties aren’t the problem here. That’s not the kind of _Not A Grown Up_ she’s worried about being. 

She’s worried about how swiftly her jealousy of Serena Kaye erupted like a sudden, vicious root system buckling concrete and asphalt. She’s worried about the insidious tendrils that seem to be spiraling out to infiltrate the small, painful muscles between her ribs. She’s worried about the fact that she can only manage shallow breaths and brief conversations before her vision goes black at the edges every time the very idea of this woman flicks through her mind. 

This is not who she is. It is not who she _has_ been since Madison was lobbing things at her head and she was plotting her own slow-burn revenge over the Brent Edwards Incident. It is not who she has been since before her mom’s murder, and how, exactly, can that kind of reversion be a good thing? 

Burke says it is, though. He says she’s feeling deeply. She is _letting_ herself feel something deeply that isn’t compulsion or drive or rage. She snaps back that rage is definitely in the mix, but he he doesn’t react. Burke is a grown up, and he won’t tell her to suck it up, to get over herself, to act her age. He won’t tell her that it’s wrong to be this consumed by jealousy. 

_Wrong actions are a possibility, Kate. You can_ behave _in ways that are hurtful or counterproductive_ , he says with his hands folded on the lined yellow pad he seldom writes on. _But feelings—even deep and deeply uncomfortable ones—simply are. They’re not right or wrong._

She’s pretty sure he’s wrong about that. With her ribs aching and the tendrils of jealousy creeping up the back of her neck to wrap around her brainstem, she’s pretty sure what she’s feeling is wrong, silly, and totally unjustified. 

_Unjustified_. 

That feels on the money. Three months of silence and a half-assed, round-about conversation on a swing set do not justify her jealousy, her petty cheap shots, the way she digs her heels in and pulls the other way when Serena Kaye suggests anything. 

Nothing could justify the way she’s behaving, and every time she sees him—every time she sees the two of them together—she swears she’ll be cool and collected. She will act like the grown up she is. 

Every time she sees the two of them together, she wants to kick him in the shins. She wants to grab him by the shirt front and pin him to the nearest wall. She wants to shout in his face that he loves her. He’s supposed to be in love with her. 

Every time, she’s nothing like a grown up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Fantasy shin kicks. Not a thing. 


	6. The Other Side of the War—Demons (4 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wishes, a lot of the time, that he could order her up some belief. Stretching all the way back to their interviews with a vampire, it has been his wish that every once in while, she could just cast logic aside and have that it can’t be, it is, it can’t be moment when they’re under a graveyard full moon and it’s practically Halloween and there’s a body with fangs and a stake through his heart. He wishes she had it in her to have that floating moment of suspended disbelief. 

> _Hello? Is anyone there?”_   
>  _— Jack Sinclair, Demons (4 x 06)_

* * *

He wishes, a lot of the time, that he could order her up some belief. Stretching all the way back to their interviews with a vampire, it has been his wish that every once in while, she could just cast logic aside and have that _it can’t be, it is, it can’t be_ moment when they’re under a graveyard full moon and it’s practically Halloween and there’s a body with fangs and a stake through his heart. He wishes she had it in her to have that floating moment of suspended disbelief. 

But, really, it was a while after that when he _really_ started shopping around for belief delivered to her doorstep. It was with Vivian Marchand’s murder—with her daughter Penny flitting around and delivering her vague prophecies—that his eyelashes, his glimpses of the first evening star, his birthday candles were turned over to wishing a little belief her way. 

It’s an imposition, he knows, and one that’s even sillier than usual. His own beliefs, such as they are, tend toward the disorganized. He can’t remember ever _really_ having a good think on what comes next, but every day, it’s his job to take a good hard look around a world teeming with people, and he does look. 

He sees first love and heartbreak at the hot dog cart. He sees triumph in the woman who is running beyond late, but manages to slip between the closing doors of the train as it is absolutely pulling away. He sees defeat in the kid who wipes out trying to do a kick flip on his board, and determination when he gets right back on. 

He looks around a world teeming with people and he sees _persistence_. He sees stories that are nowhere near finished yet. He believes in ghosts and spooks and haunts and clairvoyants and mediums—psychic and otherwise—because how could he not? 

But she does not believe, and he he knows it’s an imposition to want that for her. He knows that her relationship to the whole question of what comes next is radically and ineffably different from his own, and still he can’t help but wish she could believe. 

The desire—the wish—has grown strangely selfish over time. Back in the Penny Marchand days, it was something of a magnanimous notion. He wished vaguely that the universe would pony up with a sign from her mother, something that would give her some modicum of peace or closure, or even emotion more vague—something that might show up in Popular Girl handwriting underneath a kitten clinging to a branch. 

These days, though—the post–swing set days—his wishes for her are constant, they are laser focused these days. He hasn’t been concerning himself with vampires, or mummies shambling toward revenge, or even for Santa Claus. He sort of wishes—he more than _sort_ of wishes—that Johanna Beckett would drop into Mercy LeGrande’s body for some real talk with her daughter. Because her daughter is struggling. Her daughter has set herself some pretty high-difficulty mandatory maneuvers before she’s “allowed” to be happy, and he thinks it’s dumb.

He can—dispassionately and rationally, as though it doesn’t affect the rest of his life—say it’s objectively dumb. He can say with a high degree of confidence, that if Johanna Beckett _were_ to pop by and drop into Mercy’s body, Johanna Beckett would concur with his findings: This waiting until she’s resolved her mother’s murder before she can have a relationship is objectively dumb. 

He thinks about Pete Benton living alone all these years with nothing more than high-fidelity memories of the night he started waiting around to die. He thinks of her father and what passes for peace with him. He thinks of Roy Montgomery, his much missed friend and all the things he had decided, in the end, that he couldn’t live with. 

He thinks of the people, living and dead, whose weight she takes on her shoulders every moment of a life that she knows—she _knows_ —could be short, long or someone in between. He wishes lately that one of them would push the planchet across the board, write in the fog on the bathroom mirror, and so on. He wishes that one of them would spell out _D U M B,_ over and over. He wishes she could see it. He wishes she would believe. 

It’s selfish, yes, but it’s not selfish, too. He sees her, exhausted and sad, day after day, and his heart is full to bursting with all the things he’d tell her if he weren’t afraid she’d run. He sees her _struggling_ toward something dangerous and maybe impossible, and he really wishes Johanna Beckett, in all her astral glory, would show up for some real talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The astral plane. Super not a thing


	7. Leap Frog—Cops and Robbers (4 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t believe one trauma can heal another. In the past that is not so ancient as she wishes it were, it is possible that she believed one trauma could heal another. Not heal. Erase? Bury? Or put into perspective. That is what she has believed in the past that is not so ancient as she wishes it were. 

> _Did you learn anything?”_   
>  _— Martha Rodgers, Cops and Robbers (4 x 07)_

* * *

She doesn’t believe one trauma can heal another. In the past that is not so ancient as she wishes it were, it is possible that she believed one trauma could heal another. Not heal. Erase? Bury? Or put into perspective. That is what she has believed in the past that is not so ancient as she wishes it were. 

Burke calls this _Something to Cry About_ thinking. Actually, Burke doesn’t call it that at all. He has some fancy arrangement of syllables for it—some of which she is dead certain he has made up. _She_ calls it _Something to Cry About_ thinking, and she’s been working on it. 

_You got shot? Oooh. So sad. Did someone stab you and leave you in an alley? Well, dear, I’m sure that bullet stung …_

This is not helpful. This is not healthy. _That_ trauma could beat up _this_ trauma gets no one anywhere. She’s been working on it. Working on it is hard today, because _this_ trauma (the one that almost happened, but didn’t—it _didn’t_ ) really _could_ beat up that trauma. 

She got shot. She died, more than once, apparently. She has scars, inside and out, and there is _so much_ she struggles with each day—pain and noise, the possibility that today is the day they come after her again. She is traumatized, and she believes she has to sit with that. She has to move through it at the pace her body and mind demand. 

Except today she is racing ahead. She watched him die. She watched Martha die. She watched Alexis howling wordlessly as smoke rises into an October sky and all the sound in the world is a high-pitched shriek inside her head. 

That is today’s trauma that only _almost_ happened, that did not happen, and her scars feel insignificant. Her body feels like hers again, almost head to toe, and her mind and her heart feel clear and certain. 

She is open and gregarious and relaxed in his home, gathered around the table that’s positively groaning under the eclectic weight of too much food. She smiles into her wine glass. She smiles unabashedly at him and he blushes. His gaze stays locked with hers and the blush deepens into something less innocent. 

She should be panicking. Her interior monologue should be spooling up, even now, the one that lists all the reasons she’s not ready, all the disasters that lie in wait if she acts before she _is_ ready. That should be flooding her mind, but he almost died today. She thought she had watched him die, and panic seems to be taking a lunch break with the interior monologue of doom. 

This is not how it works. She knows all about endorphins and the short-term high. She knows all about the nonlinear trajectory of recovery and all that other Burke-ian mumbo jumbo. She understands that watching him die—believing she had watched him die—is not going to jettison her out of the spiral of sleeplessness and anxiety, paranoia and fury, debilitating sadness, and paralyzing loss of interest in anything and everything. She knows that Trapper John’s shot ringing out and the rib-jarring thump of the explosion are no messed-up panacea for her considerable woes. 

But she has a glass of wine, and there’s a good fire. He and Martha are one-upping each other with outrage and outrageously embarrassing stories. She is catching Alexis’s eye, and Alexis is catching hers. There’s a _Something to Cry About_ in progress across the table, and Alexis gives her a wan smile. 

_You broke up with your boyfriend? Oooh, tragic! Did your dad blow up right in front of your eyes?_

It’s all about perspective. Except it’s not. Except it is, and all of this is _hard._ It’s fucking hard. 

But her fingers brush his under the table. She’s fidgeting, he’s fidgeting, and their fingers brush. He startles so hard that she’s sure it’s her. It’s a reaction so pronounced that she can’t help but believe it’s her plummeting back into her body where there’s pain and there are scars and every last damned unexpected sound makes her jump. 

But it’s him startling at the electric contact and she holds on out of instinct—out of the deep-buried desire to provide comfort. Her pinky hooks around his. His gaze stays locked with hers and his mouth falls open in wonder. 

She tries to memorize the feel of it. There’s the warmth and the alien texture of his skin. There is the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows hard. There’s the rat-a-tat-tat of the pulse in her wrist. She catalogs and stores it up for later. 

But mostly she holds on. For now and for later, she holds on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Dying of tired. This is not a thing, even grading on that curve


	8. Concoct—Heartbreak Hotel (4 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kevin Ryan is a happy drunk—a happy talkative drunk. It’s confusing the X Club, staff and clientele alike, prodigiously. 

> _“Oh, um … funny story?”  
>  — Kevin Ryan, Heartberak Hotel (4 x 08)_

* * *

Kevin Ryan is a happy drunk—a happy _talkative_ drunk. It’s confusing the X Club, staff and clientele alike, prodigiously. 

“I peeked,” Ryan says in the world’s loudest stage whisper. “I know it’s bad luck, but I had to know, you know? You know?” 

The drop-dead gorgeous brunette who has been charged with seeing to their table’s needs smiles and murmurs that she does know. She casts a slightly desperate look in Castle’s direction. He tugs Ryan’s sleeve in a vain attempt to redirect his happy, talkative attention. The brunette seizes the opportunity to make a break for it. 

She practically sprints down the steps leading to their high, semi-private booth, and he wonders what it’s like to be a seasoned professional, to have kept her composure through scenes he can hardly imagine, only to be broken by the little man who packed a sweater vest for a jaunt to Atlantic City. 

“Let me guess,” Esposito the _not_ happy, _not_ talkative drunk grumbles. “It’s white?” 

Castle shakes his head, not that Esposito notices. Esposito’s attention is fixed on the bottom of his drink. He’s drunk—they’re all drunk—but that’s no excuse for pushing the wedding button. But Esposito has pushed the wedding button. He has jammed his thumb down on it, and the gentlemen in the booth to their left don’t seem to find it enhances the private dance they’re trying to enjoy. 

There’s some grumbling around the edge of their booths’ shared high back. There’s some posturing from Esposito who also seems to be the kind of drunk who’s always spoiling for a fight, but he's derailed by the incidental music of Ryan trying to describe fabric and folds and bodices and beadwork, when he is clearly only rated for describing sweater vests. 

The tension dissipates without incident. The dancers’ efforts to redirect the men’s attention are _not_ in vain, and it’s back to the three of them—a happy, talkative drunk, a not happy, not talkative drunk, and him. 

He’s not sure what kind of a drunk he is tonight. He’s not _so_ drunk, for one thing. He is _keeping-company_ drunk. He is _glad-to-be-here_ drunk. But he’s also _keeping-an-eye-out_ not so drunk, because that’s the job she had wordlessly tasked him with as she held the top of the driver’s side door on her Crown Vic and peered over it to fix him with a look. _Keep an eye out,_ that look had said, and his nod had assured her that he would. 

And so he is. He’s doing more sipping than quaffing. He’s redirecting attention and conversation when Esposito is inclined to be morose about Lanie. He’s palming phones off the table top when it seems as if drunk dialing—or at least drunk texting—is a possibility and everyone at the table who isn’t him could use a better angel to carry him through those unfortunate moments. 

“It’s ruined,” he hears Esposito say, and he tunes back int o the conversation. He tunes back in to the close-to-home action, rather than letting his thoughts linger on that look, that sacred charge to keep an eye out for her boys. 

“Ruined!” 

It’s not Esposito saying it. It wasn’t Esposito in the first place, though he understands his own mistake. Esposito has been positively goth, conversationally speaking, so naturally a melodramatic cry of _Ruined!_ must have come from him. Except it hasn’t. 

Ryan’s hand meets the surface of the table with force. The happy, talkative member of their merry band has taken a turn for the morose. “You weren’t supposed to break up!” 

“You think it was my idea?” Esposito, unexpectedly, looks more pained than angry, so go ahead and hang that on the wall of weird. “You think I _wanted_ to break up?”

“We were gonna have married dates,” Ryan’s head lolls back as he tries to tell the server of this tragedy. “All four of us.” He gestures around the table, and maybe it’s math. Maybe Kevin Ryan is just a sweater-vested genius. “You’re four of us.” His spine jerks him upright. “You and Beckett, Castle.” He’s trying to clarify, but his words are slurring. He leans in and wraps one hand around Castle’s wrist. A contagious wave of happy crashes over the two of them. “You and Beckett will get all married and we’ll go on married dates. All four!” 

It’s genius, really. It’s crystal clear genius, in his _not-so -drunk_ opinion, But Esposito, who is definitely drunk, is not impressed. Drunk Esposito has _lots_ to say about being iced out of everything. But Ryan is content to believe he’s hit on the perfect solution. He is happy to expound on the Married Date Plan to any and all booth neighbors and passers by. If Castle would let him go to the bathroom alone, he’d no doubt expound to the attendants there, handing out mints. 

Castle can’t be bothered to follow the details of Ryan’s argument for this, in their new Married-Date utopia. He is too busy manhandling a pile of phones, and it seems like there are more than three. He manhandles them until he finds his own. He fires off a text. It’s not a drunk text. He’s not _so_ drunk, but she has to know this. She _has_ to.

 _Drunk Ryan has the best ideas._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Drunk texting, Happy, Mad, Not So Drunk, Not. A. Thing. 


	9. Entrepôt—Kill Shot (4 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Therapists’ chairs are the place to have an epiphany. Her backside and the wide seat of Burke’s chair and a half are intimately familiar with this truth, and still she’s surprised every time. (Though surprise comes standard with all the best epiphanies—she can hear Castle’s Professor Pedant O’Lectureface voice in her head on that score. Professor O’Lectureface can get lost.) 

> _“Okay, so what’s the alternative?”_   
>  _— Carter Burke, Kill Shot (4 x 09)_

* * *

Therapists’ chairs are the place to have an epiphany. Her backside and the wide seat of Burke’s chair and a half are intimately familiar with this truth, and still she’s surprised every time. (Though surprise comes standard with all the best epiphanies—she can hear Castle’s Professor Pedant O’Lectureface voice in her head on that score. Professor O’Lectureface can get lost.) 

She’s not surprised she’s _having_ them, though. She’s not surprised that they keep coming despite the constantly frazzled feeling she has that she is turning out to be some kind of … clown car filled with emotional baggage. 

She _is_ surprised by how basic they are, even though she feels like she’s been at this forever. She is genuinely rocked when she quietly answers his question about Lee Travis’s death and how she feels about.

“It’s still there,” she says, tentative as as the first hint of warmth on a spring breeze. She is embarrassed and apologetic. She should be better by now—a little better at least. Burke good at his job. She’s just bad at hers—the job she has in this room with her backside settled into the wide seat for the duration She’s on the verge of saying something to this effect—apologizing or something—but the epiphany comes

“Because you haven’t fully dealt with what happened to you,” Burke says tersely. 

He sounds a little bit mad in his emotionally beige therapists’ way. She’s taking a lap through the self-loathing spiral, remembering her recent antics. She’s about to apologize—to make promises to do better, however inappropriate that probably is, given the context—when her mind finally processes the content of his speech.   
  
He—her therapist, to whom she she returned, lo! those many months ago voluntarily, if not exactly willingly—doesn’t know why she is here. In a quite fundamental sense, he does not understand that this is about so much more than the shooting. It is about so much more than a couple of scars. 

A lifetime elapses as she tries to wrap her mind everything Burke doesn’t know. She shifts in the wide seat and reviews. She hears herself— _I remember everything._ She experiences a high-fidelity cringe as she recalls her high school bitching about Serena Kaye and Castle having the temerity to be cognizant of the existence of another woman. She tries to piece her sessions together, but she sees how scattershot it is—how piecemeal it has been. 

She can’t imagine how this has happened. She wonders if Burke will blackball her to all other therapists in the tri-state area when he inevitably fires her today. She is sorely tempted to ask as he tosses her out on her ear if he ever has had a patient who is as bad at therapy as she is. She’s sorely tempted to ask if there’s an award for that. 

It’s all more than a little hyperbolic in the confines of that lifetime that’s still elapsing, but she sits with it, because that’s what one does with epiphanies in the therapist’s chair. She puts her backside into it and thinks it through.

Castle knows why she’s here. He doesn’t know _that_ she’s here. He knows about Roger and resistance bands. He knows that the scar pulls, and more recently, he unfortunately knows that it’s more than disruptions of her skin that are fucking her up. 

He knows about the wall, because she told him about it that day on the swings. He _knew_ about the wall long before she told him about it that day on the swings. _I know you crawled inside your mother’s murder, and you didn’t come out._

He knew, and he had tried his damnedest to hand her that epiphany before she could get herself shot. But epiphanies don’t come gift-wrapped and handed over. They come in fits and starts. They come slowly—so much more slowly—when one’s therapist has no real idea why one settles her backside into a wide leather seat, session after session. 

She figures she might as well tell him, before he hits the button for the ejector seat—or maybe it’s a Sweeney Todd lever that he favors. She gathers up the ragged ends of her courage and breathes.  
  
She tells him it was there before the shooting—this feeling she is here to dispel, and he is not surprised. She is not, in the end, surprised he’s not surprised. It’s obvious when she says it. As the halting words make their way out of her mouth, it’s so damned obvious that her mother was _murdered_ and she’s messed up about it. 

But she’s adding it to the epiphany count anyway, because she said the thing out loud and now everyone is on the same page. It totally counts. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Epiphanies, only flame and air and not a thing. 


	10. Formulaic—Cuffed (4 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a soap opera scenario if he’s ever seen one. They have woken up in an apparently compromising position, in an almost literal dungeon with one filthy mattress and a mysterious freeze that weighs a million pounds, handcuffs and needle marks and an Act II hatch, high up in the ceiling. It’s pure soap opera. In fact, he’s not sure that his mother hadn’t lived through this exact scenario—possibility multiple times—back during her Temptation Lane days. 

> _“_ _So you got a story to explain all of this?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, Cuffed (4 x 10)_

* * *

This is a soap opera scenario if he’s ever seen one. They have woken up in an apparently compromising position, in an almost literal dungeon with one filthy mattress and a mysterious freezer that weighs a million pounds, handcuffs and needle marks and an Act II hatch, high up in the ceiling. It’s pure soap opera. In fact, he’s not sure that his mother hadn’t lived through this exact scenario—possibility multiple times—back during her _Temptation Lane_ days. 

It’s fairly unnerving, which is strange. He would have thought that the camp of the genre—its warm familiarity, given its association with his first novel—would lighten the mood a little, but no. He knows the dramatic beats a little too well and though he kicks around the idea of playing Criswell every Halloween, he does not, in the real world as it turns out, enjoy knowing that the freezer, once they finally get it open, will yield something disturbing. He does not enjoy knowing with absolute certainty that the hatch will promise escape at least an act too early for there not to be a nasty surprise on the other side of it. 

But he does know these things, beat by beat, and like clockwork, the freezer yields chains and manacles and bloody knives. Like clockwork— after a required-by-law comic relief interlude where various parts of her body are all in his face, and each and every one really ought to require that she buy him dinner first—some bald, creepy tough is cackling wordlessly down at them. He can practically hear the cackles superimposed on one another, the creepy tough and the old woman in the cage, who by soap opera law must absolutely be in on whatever plot this.

That twist, which surely won’t be revealed until the very end of the episode at the very soonest, is the end of his prognosticatory road. He’s sort of out of dramatic beats by the time the hatch slams shut with deadly finality and the two of them land with a squawk and a thump on their backs on the filthy mattress. With the wind knocked out of him and his spine calling its lawyer preparatory to suing hm for everything he is worth, he can’t think what the next complication will be. 

He can’t think, but of course he doesn’t have to. The next complication is obvious. This is a soap opera scenario. The two of them are handcuffed to one another, and they are facing all-but certain death. What’s more, they’ve been bickering incessantly as though driven to it by an unseen narrative spirit. They are the duo who loathed one another at first sight. They are the exes who have been in a bitter feud since they split. 

They are the bitter enemies who radiate sexual tension, and they are doomed—absolutely doomed—to a passionate kiss and who knows what else on that filthy mattress in that almost literal dungeon. They are doomed to sultry saxophones punctuating this turn of events as the station cuts to a commercial break. 

All of this becomes clear to him as he waits for the breath re-entering his body to stop being made entirely of knives. He is, to say the least, not averse to this inevitable turn In their one-hundred per cent opera drama, though he’d prefer a mattress of the non-filthy variety and cuffs that lean to the more recreational end of the spectrum. He’d prefer a nice sturdy bed post, his or hers, he’s not at all picky. 

He would strongly prefer to be staring deeply into her eyes, knife-free breath heaving in his chest, getting ready for his close-up. He would very much prefer _not_ to be contemplating the awkward logistics of a cashmere turtleneck and a button-down shirt bunching between their wrists and dangling from one sleeve. 

He’d like to inhabit fully the mind and soul of that soap opera leading man right now. He’d like to know the freedom that comes with not wondering what terrible dramatic beat will put an end to the kiss and all that follows. He would like to—right now—kiss her hard enough that his mind blanks out, and hers does too. 

But he’s not a soap opera leading man, and actually they are _not_ sworn enemies, the bitter exes, the hate-at-first-sight duo—except, okay, maybe she likes to _pretend_ that she hated him at first sight, but she was charmed. Even Baby Beckett with her scowl and her chopped-short hair was charmed. 

There’s a moment when he rolls toward her on the mattress and he smiles so wide that it makes her frown. It makes her voice do that gravely thing that’s dead sexy, and this is pretty confusing. He is very much in favor of making out—filthy mattress not withstanding—but it brightens up this almost-literal dungeon considerably to think that the _reason_ they’re not making out under soap opera law.

The _reason_ she’s not about to pull back from the kiss, slap him hard, then launch herself at him again is because she likes him too much. He likes her, and who cares if they’ve been bickering the whole time? She likes him. He loves her. And soap opera law, for good or for ill, has no power here. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Meta fiction. Not a thing. Nope. Not. 


	11. Postulate—Till Death Do Us Part (4 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has mounted some kind of wrong-headed campaign. He seems to think that he he can extract secrets from her tonight, just because she’s had a couple of glasses of champagne. Just because she’s followed up the champagne with a shot or two with the boys from the precinct—and it’s overwhelmingly the boys from the precinct who seem to think shots and other displays of masculinity are required as some kind of testament to bachelorhood. Or maybe it’s just the open bar.

> _“_ _So you’ve known all along?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Till Death Do Us Part (4 x 11)_

* * *

He has mounted some kind of wrong-headed campaign. He seems to think that he he can extract secrets from her tonight, just because she’s had a couple of glasses of champagne. Just because she’s followed up the champagne with a shot or two with the boys from the precinct—and it’s overwhelmingly the boys from the precinct who seem to think shots and other displays of masculinity are required as some kind of testament to bachelorhood. Or maybe it’s just the open bar.

The shots are not the point, though. The champagne is not the point. The point is whether they’re dancing or sitting together in the most out-of-the-way corner they can find, whether they’ve stepped out into the bracing winter air to avoid the hordes that descend upon her, hell hell bent on getting her back out on the dance floor, he is trying to pry secrets from her like she’s some kind of lightweight. 

“The first ‘first dance’ song you fantasized about.” He sets a short pour of champagne in front of her and parks a matching one on the table in front of himself. She thought he had left to get them, like, a second ago, and now here he is, like he’s teleported over from the bar, and maybe she is a little bit of a lightweight tonight. She is exhausted, and her ribs hurt. Her _everything_ hurts, and these heels were far too ambitious, “And don’t say you never fantasized about it.” He gives her a warning glance and sips his champagne. “Your web of lies was totally transparent two years ago. It’s totally transparent now.” 

“Two years ago.” She sets the wayback machine for the world’s most awkward elevator ride. _I know he only dedicates his books to people he really cares about._ She recalls dress number one and dress number two. She does not recall the first dance song. She thinks with a smile of the dried bouquet that sits in a vase in her bedroom. _“_ What was your first dance going to be?” She demands. She’s gesticulating with her champagne flute, and it’s fortunate for her dress and his suit and the table linens that he’d brought her a short pour. “With Kyra?” 

“Kyra and I were never getting married.” He scoffs as though it’s a ludicrous question, but the posture crumbles. “Kyra was never getting married.” He spins his champagne flute in a slow, thoughtful circle on the white tablecloth. “Journey if I had my way. Bangles if she’d had hers.” 

“Journey?” She shouldn’t laugh. It’s the champagne and the shots’ fault. It’s the fact that she’s tired and apparently kind of a lightweight now. So she does laugh all through the impassioned defense of the songwriting craft evident in“Faithfully,” and the fact that she’s laughing makes him smile behind his champagne flute, so maybe that’s okay. 

It seems more than okay, and then he’s suddenly pulling her up out of her chair. She’s about to object when he mutters, “Incoming,” under his breath and starts waltzing her between the tables and toward the dance floor. Along the way, she sees what he means. There’s a scrum of precinct people and they have a Flaming Shots gleam in their eyes. There’s a slow-enough Boy Band ballad spinning right now, and the dance floor is definitely the better option, even though it means a brand-new secret-spelunking expedition on his part. 

He tries to bait her into talking about her love life that first year at Stanford. When that fails, he moves on to pumping her for information about the Boss Battle Lanie and Esposito must have had after the fatal double date with Kevin and Jenny. When she stands firm on her embargo against that particular topic or any of the off-shoots of his brain might been cooking up to sidestep those boundaries, he circles back to the fantasy wedding he’s sure she’s had in development since early childhood. 

“I think there was a goth period,” he says as he leads her back to another, off the beaten path table and steadies her elbow as she sits. Her shoes were forged in the very bowels of hell, and she’s grateful for the assist. “I think you would have gone with the Cure, back in the day.” 

“The Cure?” She wrinkles her nose at him and tries, discreetly, to kick her damned shoes out of the way. “If you say ‘Lovesong,' I’m going to hit you over the head with a centerpiece!”

“‘Lovesong’?” He looks offended on her fictional behalf. “Please, Aspiring Bride Beckett was edgy. ‘Fire in Cairo’.” 

She’s laughing again. She’s letting her head fall back and she’s slouching and slithering her way into something like a comfortable position—or a position, at least, where everything hurts less. There’s no champagne in front of her this time, but there’s a a tall glass of water, cool and perfect. She doesn’t know when he got that for her. She keeps losing little bits of time, and it’s not the champagne or the shots that are now a distant memory. 

She’s tired. This is, by far, the most she’s demanded of her mind and body since the shooting. Her fingers find the cool, perfect curve of the glass of water and she takes a long swallow of it. She’s grateful for the sensation of it sliding down her throat, for the way that it cools her from the inside. It brings clarity. It rouses her like a little silver chime struck somewhere far away. It’s just a glass of water, but that’s what it does. 

He hasn’t been trying to pry secrets from her. He hasn’t been working hard all night to take advantage of the fact that, tonight at least, she’s sore and exhausted enough to be a real lightweight. He’s been making small talk. He’s been running interference for her. He’s been taking his plus-one duties seriously, and in the final reckoning, he’s been a top-notch plus-one. 

“Do you really want to know a secret?” she asks, peeking through the fingers she’s pressed melodramatically to her eyes. 

“Yes,” he says instantly. He sits up straight and leans in. “Yes I do.” 

“I’m glad—” She stops, starts again, stops again. She knows what she wants to say. She just doesn’t know what the words are. She is _so tired._ ”I’m glad you couldn’t compete with Lady Gaga. Or a teenaged boy.” 

He smiles at her, wide and goofy, but small and intimate, too. It’s his plus-one smile. “Me, too.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Exhaustion. Clearly not a thing. Secrets untold: Not a thing. 


	12. Folly—Dial M for Mayor (4 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wonders if she’s awake. She probably isn’t, he tells himself. It’s been an eternal few days and she must be exhausted. She’d be a fool If she were still up this late, and that would make two of them. 

> _“You think I don’t know what’s at stake here?”_   
>  _— Kate Beckett, Dial M for Mayor (4 x 12)_

* * *

He wonders if she’s awake. She probably isn’t, he tells himself. It’s been an eternal few days and she must be exhausted. She’d be a fool If she were still up this late, and that would make two of them. 

He is not only awake, he is wandering the streets in a coat that’s not warm enough. He has clandestine-meeting-in-a-parking-garage hangover, and he’s is trying to walk it off. He has overdue-but-deep-misgivings-about-keeping-secrets-from-her anxiety he could stand to walk off, too. Unfortunately, Manhattan doesn’t have enough miles of concrete to serve that purpose.

Manhattan does have this city block, though. It has her city block, and like a fool, he’s standing on the corner right across from her building. 

The wind howls around him. It weighs in on the things he’s contemplating—a text, a phone call, a ring of the buzzer. It uses a scale from one to ten—one being big mistake, ten being bad idea—but he’s not in the mood to take advice from nature. He’s not in the mood to take advice. He’s in the mood to wonder if she’s awake. 

She might be. There’s a light burning in the window he thinks is hers. He thinks of Jim Beckett and the story of the night light that wasn’t. It’s a data point that might support the she’s-awake-too hypothesis—the she’s-a-fool-too-and-maybe-they-should-be-fools-together hypothesis. Or it might be someone else’s window and he might find himself escorted into the back of the police cruiser the stranger with the light on summons to deal with the fool standing on the corner staring up at their window. 

The possibility has him striking rapidly out for home, then it has him stopping dead. It has him reversing course and standing his ground, eyes defiantly lifted to the light that may or may not be hers burning in the window. If he gets hauled in for loitering or vagrancy or being generally creepy when it’s way too late, then he has an excuse to call her—to wake her up or not. 

He wonders in which of the fantasy realms she would actually bail him out in this scenario, then he wonders at his own wondering, because she obviously would bail him out. She’d break him out, as she’s said—unprompted—before. Both things, with the wind howling around him, feel equally true—she’d break him out; she’d leave him to rot. It’s exactly that ambiguity that has him up for good, walking the streets, arguably stalking her. 

He doesn’t like not being on her side. He doesn’t like when the screwball tension between them becomes actual tension. But that’s exactly what had happened over the last few days, and he’d let it stand tonight. He’d lurked beyond the bullpen fencing while Gates, of all people, had spoken to her gently and wisely her about how to live with the fact that she was walking away from a huge case with nothing but a patsy. He’d left without so much as their usual exchange of pleasantries. 

He’s ashamed of his own pettiness, and of the corners he now sees he’d have had her cut to arrive at his way of seeing the situation. He’s ashamed of behaving badly, but that’s not the main reason he’s been camped out on this corner for so long. 

He dislikes the temporary disruption that they’re mostly through with. He doesn’t like—profoundly does not like—lying to her. He’s had his rationalizations for it in the all-too-recent past. He still buys into some of them. They creep up the back of his neck right there on that street corner and whisper right in his ear that it’s a necessary lie, a temporary lie, a lie that shadowy forces swirling around her mother’s murder like cruel, judgmental January wind have given him no choice but to keep on telling. 

But the truth is it doesn’t matter whether he buys into his own reasons anymore. The lie has been told. He re-tells it every day he keeps this from her. It feels true that it’s saving her life. It feels true that it’s selfish, that it will absolutely blow up in his face, sooner rather than later. That thought, rounding the corner into certainty is interrupted by the buzz of his phone where it sits within the confines of her jacket. 

It’s a text bubble, bright green. He looks up and sees a shape—a person—barely discernible and back lit. 

_Castle. Is it possible you are standing on the corner outside my building?_

He is frozen—fixed in place—for a long moment. He is panicked and paralyzed by everything swirling around him, them, the two of them. At the same time, though, there is something reassuring and right with the world about the fact that he’s up and she’s up. 

_Me? Building?_ He finally replies, He tilts his head back to peer at her window. He gives a tiny wave there’s almost no chance of her seeing. _What kind of fool is up at this hour?_

He thinks he sees a palm press against the glass. It’s probably imaginary, but he thinks of her wanting to flick his ear, punch his arm hard enough to bruise and settling for a palm pressed firmly against glass that must be freezing. 

_Yeah, what kind of fool?_ One message flares in the darkness, then another. _Night, Castle._

Until tomorrow, Detective, he replies, dutifully and immediately. 

It’s balance restored for now. It’s the two of them lining up alongside one another. It’s no proof against what seems to be bearing down on him—on them—with frightening speed. But it’s balance restored and a fool’s errand justified. 

He stands long enough to watch the light burning in her window flick off. He thinks of her staring down the darkness. He turns and goes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Rambling. So ramble. Not a thing. 


	13. Roughshod—An Embarrassment of Bitches (4 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think we were the mean kids today,” he says. He frowns and thinks about it a moment. “More yesterday and the day before that.” He frowns again. “Wait. Was there a day before yesterday? How many days have we been Keeping Up With Cappuccio? Because it kind of feels like forever. But still … those were some mean kid shenanigans.” 

> _“No harm, no foul, right?”  
>  — Kay Cappuccio, An Embarrassment of Bitches (4 x 13) _

* * *

“I think we were the mean kids today,” he says. He frowns and thinks about it a moment. “More yesterday and the day before that.” He frowns again. “Wait. Was there a day before yesterday? How many days _have_ we been _Keeping Up With Cappuccio?_ Because it kind of feels like forever. But still … those were some mean kid shenanigans.” 

He turns to look at her, eyes streaming from the cold and the punishing wind. They’re on their way to drown their sorrows over their mutually Royal-less existence. They decided to walk. Or they _are_ walking, and it might have something to do with the punishing wind. It might have something to do with the unspoken mutual suspicion that they might deserve a little punishment.

“Mean kids?” she scoffs, even though she’s writhing a little inside. “Who’s a mean kid?” 

His head swivels toward her again. The fact that he’s hunched deep into the turned up collar of his coat, paired with the aforementioned streaming eyes, somewhat spoils the effect of the glare that she suspects would have been Martha-worthy under normal circumstances. “You can’t tell me you don’t feel judged.” 

She literally can’t tell him that at the moment. They turn the corner and somehow the wind they have been walking directly into for blocks is howling at them head on from this direction, too. The wall of cold steals her breath. 

Less literally, she can’t tell him she doesn’t feel judged. She had braced herself for Royal inevitably running to him—he of the ribeye and the dedicated fetch hallway. He of the hour-long hunt for Mr. Squeaky and terrible movies with talking chihuahuas on demand. Naturally, she had assumed she couldn’t compete with any of that. 

But Royal had run, without hesitation, to Kay Cappuccio and her nightmare of an attack chihuahua, and that stings worse than the wind that’s currently trying to flay the skin from her cheekbones. 

“Cold, Castle,” she gasps. “I feel _cold.”_ She stumbles into a run, grateful that she knows the way to the Old Haunt better than well enough to find it through eyes she’s squeezed closed to mere slits in the hopes that her eyeballs will not actually freeze and shatter in their sockets. He runs beside her, elbow mostly against hers. They barrel down the steps, bickering as they bump together trying to get through the door and into the warmth of the tavern’s interior. 

They make their way to the usual booth they take when it’s just the two of them. It’s just the two of them a lot lately. They call out breathless greetings along the way. She slides into her side of the booth and wraps her arms around herself. She wages war against the goosebumps.

“Hot toddy?” He stands and peels off his coat. He shivers and looks like he wishes he hadn’t. She nods and he heads off to the bar. 

She stamps her feet to get the feeling back. She peels off her gloves and blows fruitlessly on her hands. Her breath has somehow held on to the bitter cold of the long January night. She’s not enjoying the metaphor. She’s not enjoying the fact that her mind seems intent on confronting the Mean Kid accusation and the Royal Rejection. 

She’s grumpy with him for linking the two things in her mind, for putting so fine a point on it and calling them both out. On top of freezing to death, courtesy of some stupid, unspoken agreement about punishment, she’s grumpy with him. But he has a hot toddy with her name on it, so she sets the grumpiness aside. 

“She was a _suspect_ ,” she blurts, so maybe not quite _aside_. 

_“_ A really _annoying_ suspect,” he says in the agreeable tone he reserves for when he is definitely trying to egg her on. “And not the brightest bulb in the criminally tacky chandelier.” 

“ _Mean_ is overstatement,” she tells her hot toddy. “I was just … direct. And persistent when the evidence pointed to her. I wasn’t _mean._ ” 

It’s true and it’s _not_ true. Kay Cappuccio’s multiple interrogations definitely raised the question, _If a snark falls in the forest and the person on the receiving end has no apparent snark receiver, does it still make a sick burn?_

But the answer to that question is irrelevant in this scenario. Kay Cappuccio’s money, her obliviousness, her honest-to-god entourage are no real excuse for her own enhanced zingers and internal judgements. Kay Cappuccio’s lonely-in-a-crowd existence deserves some kind of empathy from her, but she feels unequipped to reconcile the gap between what she knows she _should_ feel, and what she _does_ feel. And it’s not as though getting needled slightly by one cop is going to leave a mark on someone like that. “We were kind of.” 

He seems relieved to have an official partner in crime. He smiles at her over the top of his oversized mug. They’re silent. They are mirror images, contemplating the better selves they haven’t been in a long while. 

“Still,” he says at long last. He traces the rim of his mug with one finger. “Royal went pretty over the top with the punishment.“

“Right?” She clicks her tongue. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and channels Becks, grade eleven. She takes a theatrical sip of her toddy. _“So_ over the top.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Kay Cappuccio: There was no there there. So there is no there here. There is no thing. 


	14. The Thing—The Blue Butterfly (4 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s had music on his mind since the moment they stepped through Jerry and Viola Maddox’s front door. It might get him killed, one way or another. He hums incessantly, that’s way number one that the music on his mind might get him killed. She does not appreciate his humming, and she most definitely does not appreciate the scatting—the weak approximation of scatting—he’s inclined to lapse into when he’s thinking hard.

> _“_ _Come here to talk music, did ya?”  
> _ _— Jerry Maddox/Joe Flynn, The Blue Butterfly (4 x 14)_

* * *

He’s had music on his mind since the moment they stepped through Jerry and Viola Maddox’s front door. It might get him killed, one way or another. He hums incessantly, that’s way number one that the music on his mind might get him killed. She does not appreciate his humming, and she most definitely does not appreciate the scatting—the weak approximation of scatting—he’s inclined to lapse into when he’s thinking hard. 

“Is your name Louis Armstrong?” she asks sharply. Without waiting for an answer, she fires off a follow-up question. “Is your name Ella Fitzgerald?” He mumbles a sheepish _No,_ but she’s already steamrolling over him. “These, Castle, are the names of the two and only two humans who are now or ever have been permitted to scat.” 

He mumbles a _Sorry_. He hides a grin behind his hand, because she has strong feeling about scatting and that’s adorable. That just makes him want to hum something with a little swing and a lot of blue notes and that just might get him killed. 

He and the music on his mind are more popular on the home front than they are at the precinct—at least at first. He buys a Victrola. It is _enormous,_ and he’s not sure how he didn’t notice how enormous it was in Jerry and Viola’s cosy-to-the-point-of-cramped little apartment, but in his ridiculously spacious loft, there seems to be nowhere for it to go. 

It’s a laugh at first, the way it seems to pull light and space into itself like some kind of gravitational anomaly. His mother hums in counterpoint to him, and Alexis is fascinated by the 78s. He is, once again, forbidden to scat in no uncertain terms. The two of them nod in vigorous agreement when he sulkily informs him of the base cruelty of Beckett’s restrictions. 

Completely unfair scatting moratorium aside, it seems that at home, he has at least found a safe place to unleash the music on his mind, and it’s such a relief. There are dance lessons with the iPad propped on the table playing YouTube instructional videos with the captions on. Alexis indulges him and his mother takes issue with millennial whippersnappers. She demonstrates her own versions, and they all try not to stumble against the impossible bulk of the thing that seems to be everywhere. 

The shine of it wears off—for them, not for him. He’s still got music on his mind, so he hauls the thing into his study. He smuggles stacks of 78s into the loft in the vain hope of avoiding Alexis’s judgmental eye. He lounges in his leather chair, bourbon in hand and lets the music wash over him—Louie Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Cab Calloway, and Ella, of course. 

He imagines his feet gliding through steps more smoothly than they ever will in the real world—even without a behemoth of a Victrola constantly underfoot. He imagines himself as Joe Flynn. PI. He imagines her as Vera Mulqueen, the gangster’s moll. He imagines taking her in his arms, casting aside her white fox stole to plant his palm against the skin left bare by a plunge-back dress that’s practically liquid silk. He imagines the world falling away as they dance. 

The music—the constant humming, the scatting when he forgets and takes his life in his hands, the impromptu dance steps he takes across the bullpen and into the elevator—is a medium. It’s a conduit or a release valve or some damned mechanical metaphor he can’t come up with. 

He feels more for her every day—more intensely and more comprehensively, every single day. That’s all been true since the beginning, but he’s only taken stock of it recently. He _feels_ for her, and all the tentative new encounters they’ve been having—cuffed together, off-handedly taking up posts as one another’s plus-ones, swaying to appalling pop music with their arms carelessly looped around one another’s bodies—every one turns the intensity up and up and he doesn’t know how much he can stand of this constant building, _building._

The music on his mind is release. It’s a reminder of what he’s waiting for—what all this patience is about. And it’s a temptation, for him and for her, because as annoyed as she pretends to get—annoyed as she genuinely is sometimes—she hums along. She does a soft shoe of her own or the mirror image of his steps, and it seems like a swing set for a new year. 

That’s all well and good. Stretched out in his leather chair, it’s a lovely, promising thing, even though the Victrola is a behemoth with no place to be in his loft. 

_In his loft_. 

The phrasing snags at his brain. His loft. There’s absolutely no place for it here. There’s definitely no place for the stacks of 78s he could practically make furniture out of, and he’s tired of stubbing his toe, knocking his knees, tripping over the damned thing and sending the needle on blood-curdling journeys across the shellac. 

There’s absolutely no place for it here, but he sees her place in his mind’s eye. He sees the funky mix and match of everything and the sprawling space. He sees the two of them dancing and his phone is in his hand. 

He dials. She answers. He hums a snatch of one of Billie’s deep cuts. It’s something she hums along with, probably without realizing. It’s something that makes her smile. She’s smiling now, even though she takes an annoyed tone with him. 

“ _What do you want, Castle?”_

The phrasing snags at his brain again. He thinks, for a moment, of revealing all, of answering her question fully and completely. But they’re in the dancing stages of this. He knows this. He relishes the dance, so he answers at an oblique angle. 

“It’s about what _you_ want, Beckett,” he drawls. “How about a little music?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is the real thing, so clearly this is not a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2H6qC23RPY


	15. Panic! At the Disco—Pandora (4 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s kind of funny about Alexis. It’s kind of very funny that everyone has known since she filled out the paperwork weeks ago, but he had no idea, and now he’s freaking out. He’s nattering on about church and state and unit cohesion—about them and this being their thing, and she focuses on the fact that it’s funny, because otherwise there are butterflies. There are lots of inconvenient, not-crime-scene-appropriate butterflies. 

> _“_ _Why’s mine a panic button?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Pandora (4 x 15)_

* * *

It’s kind of funny about Alexis. It’s kind of _very_ funny that everyone has known since she filled out the paperwork weeks ago, but he had no idea, and now he’s freaking out. He’s nattering on about church and state and unit cohesion—about _them_ and this being _their_ thing, and she focuses on the fact that it’s funny, because otherwise there are butterflies. There are lots of inconvenient, not-crime-scene-appropriate butterflies. 

So she keeps funny front and center, even as she sweeps the beam of her flashlight over the pavement. She needles him just enough to keep him going. It’s like pulling the string on a Chatty Cathy doll the millisecond before she falls silent, and the cycle starts all over again. It keeps the funny going while she does her job. It’s multitasking at its best. 

He does wind down about it, eventually, though. She catches him throwing glimpses his daughter’s way. She catches him looking proud, then distressed when he sees her adjusting the body bag on the gurney, then proud again, which is his default state, then he shifts into annoyed mode when she and Lanie seem to be staying behind to review details of some kind together, then he comes around to proud again, though it’s mixed with something other than annoyance—genuine concern, she eventually works out, even though he’s trying to cover with a thin veneer of annoyance. 

The concern concerns her. The concern is not funny, but her mind seems determined to follow that thread. He’s not concerned for Alexis and her delicate sensibilities. He’s not _seriously_ concerned with that, though she’s sure that was one of his tactics. He’s no more concerned for her safety than he is in any given moment of his fundamentally overprotective life. He’s certainly not concerned that she can’t do the job, so what is it? What _is_ it? 

She comes back to them, to _they,_ to _this is_ our _thing_ and there are those damned butterflies again. They’re not entirely pleasant this time around. He doesn’t want his daughter around long enough to notice there’s a them. There’s sort of a them. He doesn’t want her around long enough to … mess with the them-in-progress that they’ve been working on? There are some upsetting possibilities there. 

She wonders—she’s wondered ever since she came back to the precinct and he came back to the precinct—how well, exactly, Alexis has coped with the shooting. She remembers the bank and the girl’s not-so-veiled lashing out about her father and Martha being all she had. She thinks they’ve arrived in a more cordial place since then, but she doesn’t really know. She hasn’t seen much of the girl lately, and she’s reasonably sure that one melodramatic save doesn't make up for the fact that she’s the reason the girl’s dad puts himself in danger virtually every day of the week. 

But there’s a possibility worse than that. There’s the possibility that his daughter thinks—or he thinks his daughter thinks, which amounts to the same thing—that he could do better, that he should try to do better. She’d really rather be contemplating the last violent minutes of their multiply murdered John Doe’s life than contemplating _that_ possibility, but it’s a real one. Alexis may simply think that Kate is not good enough for for her father. 

It’s a soul-gnawing worm she knows well. It’s a soul-gnawing worm that keeps her up at night when she thinks about the things she’s keeping from him, and it burrows deeper than that. It’s more ancient and fundamental than her sins of omission. She thinks—she wonders often when she’s in the midst of a long, dark night of the soul—if she isn’t just bad at relationships. She wonders if her rigidity, her chronic dispassion, her unfailingly practical nature all have her marked for well-deserved spinsterhood. 

It’s a spiral once the funny falls away. The fact of Alexis has her in her own head. She is suddenly very concerned about synergy and cohesion, about church and state. She is suddenly concerned about any number of things that her chronically dispassionate mind, her unfailingly practical nature inform her are ludicrous, first to last. But her mind—her nature—apparently have no power here. 

He’s the one who snaps her out of it—not on purpose, though. She catches him muttering to himself and gesturing. She catches him practicing one of his gallant, flirty little speeches—the kind he delivers three times an hour these days. She catches him being an awkward, goofy dork who comes over all tongue tied every time he spies his lady love in the hall. 

She’s laughing at herself about the lady love. She _is_ the lady love. She’s laughing at herself about ninety percent of the vocabulary that springs to mind as she pieces together and half imagines what he’s up to. She’s letting the butterflies roam free and laughing at the whole silly mess of this, and when she looks up, Alexis catches her eye. The girl’s gaze flicks to Castle in all his dorky glory, then back to Kate. 

The two of them roll their eyes in perfect sync. They shake their heads in unison. He’s concerned about the two of them catching him like this, and it’s too late: He’s already caught. 

It’s pretty funny. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A thing not to be concerned about is not a thing. 


	16. Inquiring Minds—Linchpin (4 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels like he’s been turned inside out, then back again. No. That’s not the right metaphor. He feels like he’s been stretched to capacity, then let go to snap back all the way for the briefest of moments, never to be the same again. He feels like a lot of elastic, clothing-based metaphors, and he doesn’t really want to talk about any of it. 

> _“What do you know about him?”_   
>  _— Kate Beckett, Linchpin (4 x 16)_

* * *

He feels like he’s been turned inside out, then back again. No. That’s not the right metaphor. He feels like he’s been stretched to capacity, then let go to snap back all the way for the briefest of moments, never to be the same again. He feels like a lot of elastic, clothing-based metaphors, and he doesn’t really want to talk about any of it. 

He sort of takes that as a given—he does not want to talk about it. This is his default mode with anything emotionally heavier than your average tearjerker sports movie. He—at best—wants to write about it. But he doesn’t want to write about it, either. That’s another given, isn’t it? He’s not so sure. 

He doesn’t want to talk about Sophia—that much he knows. He and not wanting to talk about Sophia go way back to the moment she went all Stern Headmistress on him at the docks in front of—among others—his suddenly nosy daughter. No, he most definitely does not want to talk about Sophia, and at the moment, he’s not sanguine that the day will come that he wants to write about her. 

But there’s … the other thing. 

There should be no question at all—he does not want to talk about that. He has _never_ wanted to talk about that, at least since he asked when he was seven or whatever and his mother uncorked her purplest prose to paint a highly age-inappropriate word picture of the night he was conceived. Why would he want to talk about it now? 

But he _does_ ask Danberg about it. And then he _does_ ask Beckett, and it’s not at all clear what that’s about. 

He thinks at first that it might be the spy thing, that maybe his inner child—the version of him who is the age at which he asked his mother, minus one day—might just be excited by the possibility that he is The Son of Bond. Except the surest way to ruin James Bond would be to saddle him with kith and kin. There’s a reason Diana Rigg had to die, above and beyond the fact that she was wildly out of George Lazenby’s league. And on that note, he rejects the inner child hypothesis. 

It doesn’t leave him much to go on. Or maybe it leaves him too much because it comes back around to Sophia doesn’t it? 

There’s the possibility that she was lying entirely. There’s a considerable body of evidence in support of that idea, but as lies go, it’s a tasty blend of something out of the blue and highly specific. He never talked about his father—about his lack thereof—with her. Why would he have, given that he’s never wanted to talk about him with anyone, and their pillow talk, such as it was, did not exactly tend toward the intimate. 

There’s the much worse possibility that she was telling the truth, or some version of it, and he doesn’t know what that might mean. If this hypothetical man has—or had—anything to do with him, what could his relationship to Sophia have been that she’d agreed to him shadowing her? If this hypothetical man is—or was—an Asset, was he so bad at his job that he had no idea what Sophia was? Or was he in on it? Was he a sleeper KGB agent, too? Is he _still?_

His head rises and falls and spins with every damned thing he doesn’t want to talk about. It pulses and rattles like the jankiest of parking lot carnival rides, and he can’t seem to switch it off, for love nor bourbon. 

He slams around the office, the kitchen, the _en suite_. He can’t work. He doesn’t seem to want to eat, so he might as well get ready for bed, despite it being at least an hour before any self-respecting Manhattan preschooler would deign to go. 

He yanks back the sheets and flings himself beneath the covers. He turns off the lights with extreme prejudice, but sleep will never come—not like this. He flops on his back, the insomniac panic already setting in. One hand reaches, unbidden, for his phone. 

He shouldn’t call her. There’s no reason to call her. There’s nothing to talk about.

He calls her. 

“The thing is, I sort of _did_ think I got special access because of my charm,” he says before she can even register that it’s him. He thinks about it and cannot resist adding, “My _considerable_ charm.”

There’s a beat on her end, not quite long enough to call a pause. 

_“Charm._ ” She draws out the word. She leans into the _ch–. “Well that definitely seems to be the most likely scenario, Castle.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If you don’t want to think about it or talk about it, it is definitely not a thing. 


	17. Waiting on the Telephone—Once Upon a Crime (4 x 17)

> _“Did you get all that?”  
>  — Martha Rodgers, Once Upon a Crime (4 x 17)_

* * *

There’s a switch that suddenly flips in him. It’s kind of fun to watch. It’s definitely _interesting_ to watch, because one minute he is deeply invested in his hyperbole-laden litany of all the ways in which his mother’s harmless play is ruining his life, and the next he blenches. She can almost see time rewinding for him like a picture, jagged with static, on an old-school VCR. 

“She _called_ you.” He narrows his eyes. He sounds far more terrified by the prospect than he would like to sound. And he knows that _she_ knows he would love to be able to turn the _Terrified_ dial way down. “The two of you … spoke?” 

The question mark is a late addition to the proceedings. It represents his hope of deliverance. But for him, this is definitely an _Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here_ scenario. For him, it is to be torture. 

“She left a message.” She casually examines her phone. _The_ phone on which his mother had called her. She lets him sweat it out—the idea of the message and the phone she’s holding now. When the _Terrified_ dial reaches eleven, she gives it another crank. “We played a little phone tag. But we finally connected.” 

“Oh, _good_.” He keeps his tone even, more or less, but the tension at the corners of his mouth, his posture, and positively everything else about him radiates a message that is one-hundred-and-eighty degrees from _Oh,_ good. “You connected.” 

“Mmhmm,” she says as though she’s distracted. She lets her noncommittal do the work, and she lets him sit with everything it conjures up for him. . She lets him writhe, because he’s desperate to know, terrified to find out, and utterly determined not to ask for particulars about the conversation. She keeps an eye on her watch, curious to see how long that determination will actually last. The answer is: Not long. 

“I just hope she wasn’t a bother.” He shoehorns his concern almost literally in the middle of something she was saying about the case. “It’s just that she is _obsessed_ with her show. She just goes on and on about this … fictitious history, and I’m sure she just bored you with that, nonstop. No room at the Martha Rodgers Inn for anything not play-related, right?” 

“It’s an _accomplishment_ ,” she scolds, and it’s not exactly part of the game she’s playing with him right now. It _is_ an accomplishment, and even though she knows that he and his mother have an abrasive kind of love between them, she thinks they go too far with it sometimes. She feels defensive of them both. She feels silly about it, so she flips the switch back to her torture of him, already in progress. “Besides, we had a lovely chat.” 

She puts just enough oomph on _chat_ that it knocks him off his pins again. She is, for once, delighted with the depth and breadth of his writer’s imagination as she watches its alarming byproducts flick by behind his eyes. She wishes she could somehow project them on to the murder board for a public viewing that would surely be fun for all. She wishes she had popcorn.

“Oh, ho!” The forced chuckle sounds like it emanates from some kind of misbegotten dancing lawn ornament. “I know my mother’s ‘chats’.” The air quotes she carves out are totally unnecessary. They can hear the air quotes on Saturn. “A series of monologues about her studio?” 

He’s literally sweating this now. There’s a sheen on his forehead thanks to the effort he has to expend on not demanding answers to every question he is not asking. She actually imagines she can hear his heart pounding in his chest. She thinks about putting him out of his misery, but a switch kind of flips for her, too. 

She doesn’t know where to take this, now that he’s lobbed another question mark at her. The truth is, as badly as he wants to talk about her talk with his mother, that’s the last thing she wants. 

It was a lovely chat with Martha, at least on the surface of it. Once the invitation was extended and accepted, she’d expected Martha to flit away, trailing air kisses into the phone. But she had lingered. She’d gone on and on about Poor Richard’s non-existent social life. 

She’d mentioned Serena Kaye by name and alluded to some attempted fix up that he had swiftly vetoed. She’s mentioned a lot of things Beckett had missed thanks to the sudden furious ringing in her ears, which had subsided just in time for her to hear the invitation, to accept the invitation, to immediately regret the stupid way she’d related _Make a Date of It._

The conversation had flipped an important switch for her, too, and now she’s torturing him to keep whatever it is that sheds light on at bay. She’s torturing him so she doesn’t have to think about what it means that he never really wanted to pursue Serena Kaye, that he shut Martha down when she tried to play match maker.

She watches him suffering, once again, because she can’t deal. But she’ll never be able to deal if she doesn’t try, so she flips the switch back. She meets his eye. 

“No monologues,” she shakes her head. “We actually talked a little bit about you …” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Undiscussed things: The least thingy thing in thingdom


	18. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams—A Dance With Death (4 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s strangely easy in his mind these days. He knows deep in the core of himself that he really shouldn’t be. The secret he’s been sitting on for months is not getting any smaller or less explosive. It’s not getting any less wrong—or any less necessary—to keep it from her, and he should have some kind of contingency plan. He should know how he’ll approach damage control when the damned thing blows up in his face or worse, the deal he’s struck with the shadowy figure falls apart and … lots of things that are a lot worse. 

> _“Um… do you have any idea why she was being so secretive?”_   
>  _— Kevin Ryan, A Dance With Death (4 x 18)_

* * *

He’s strangely easy in his mind these days. He knows deep in the core of himself that he really shouldn’t be. The secret he’s been sitting on for months is not getting any smaller or less explosive. It’s not getting any less wrong—or any less necessary—to keep it from her, and he should have some kind of contingency plan. He should know how he’ll approach damage control when the damned thing blows up in his face or worse, the deal he’s struck with the shadowy figure falls apart and … lots of things that are a lot worse. 

But he’s not thinking about worse. He’s not even thinking about damage control. He is thinking about how much more comfortable she seems to be in her skin these days and how pleasantly charged every moment between them seems to be. 

He’s thinking about a world in which she recognizes her own strength and gives herself credit for how far she’s come physically and emotionally since the shooting. He is daring to imagine a world where the secret he’s been keeping just … never comes up again. Denial, he’ll have you know, is lovely this time of year.

Denial or no, though, he is easy in his mind and trying not to notice the dramatic themes piling up around him. He’s trying hard not to notice that everyone around him from his mother to Ryan to Oona Marconi seems to be restless. They all seem to be exploring second acts, escape routes they have no intention of using, and back-up plans. They are not at all content to dwell in the now, and it’s troubling. 

Outside of his domestic and avocational sphere, their victim—both the victim they thought they had and the victim it turns out they do have—is a case in point. Are cases in point? Odette Morton should probably be awarded a posthumous gold medal for her sophisticated Get Out of Jail Free scheme—the woman bought herself a doppelgänger, for Pete’s sake. And that was _after_ she’d secured herself a patsy to murder her grandfather. Odette Morton might actually deserve some kind of Nobel Special Prize in Commitment to Lifelong Debauchery or something. 

But as far as daring escapes go, he’ll take the doppelgänger, rather than the doppelgänged, personally. He’ll take Barbra Landau and her commitment to her dreams any day of the week, and really, what’s a little blackmail among people who, it turns out, don’t know each other at all? 

He likes Barbra Landau. He thinks of himself as liking her pluck, her tenacity, her practicality in the face of such an extraordinary set of circumstances. He thinks through what must have been the original plan—Escape Route #1 where Barbra does Odette’s literal dirty work for a little while as a means to an end—a way to claw her way out of poverty, out of the strip club life, out of the orbit of the Jason Bagwells of the world. So, a nose job and a crash course in socialite blather, and Barbra Landau pulls a little closer to her dream.

He likes the next phase of her adventure a little less. A lot less, the more he thinks it through. He imagines the train derailment. He imagines the fact of Odette’s death crashing down on Barbra—the trauma of it all. He wonders if it was even a decision to claim her doppelgänger’s identity. He wonders if it just … happened, if, in a terrifying moment, she found herself facing the prospect of having the precious little headway she’d managed to make stripped cruelly away, and becoming Odette wasn’t even a decision. It just happened. It just kept happening until she was so close to having what she’d always dreamed of. 

That resonates more than he’d like. It reverberates through a mind he is still telling himself is at ease. It settles into dark and troubled corners and he wishes it wouldn’t. He wishes he didn’t suddenly, intuitively, and entirely understand a great deal about the reality of Barbra Landau’s life as she asymptotically approached everything she ever wanted. 

She was lonely. She would have been so lonely, having to hold herself aloof from everyone lest she let something slip. She would have been exhausted trying to play the sister, the reformed socialite who took money as a given, the client suddenly confronted by a creepy, intense, and overly familiar financial advisor. 

He wonders if there was any part of it she got to enjoy, if there was even one moment on stage, or in rehearsals, or in the makeup chair waiting for the opening pyrotechnics, One moment when she was easy enough in her mind that she was able to appreciate how close she’d drawn to everything she’d ever dreamed of. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Stinky enough to be a thing, and yet not a thing, At all. 


	19. Nucleon–Nucleon—47 Seconds (4 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world feels wide right now. She’s made it through her interviews with families, born and chosen both, and with brothers-in-arms. She has found nothing to indicate that any one of the victims was the particular target for the bomb. It’s a non-answer—the absence of an answer, and the world feels wide and chaotic and not particularly kind. It feels expansive and frightening, and it weighs on her. She’s trying to just let that be. She is trying, as Burke has urged her to try a hundred times, to simply acknowledge what she’s feeling, rather than bullying herself out of it. 

> “Who’s ‘we’?”   
> — Richard Castle, 47 Seconds (4 x 19)

* * *

The world feels wide right now. She’s made it through her interviews with families, born and chosen both, and with brothers-in-arms. She has found nothing to indicate that any one of the victims was the particular target for the bomb. It’s a non-answer—the absence of an answer, and the world feels wide and chaotic and not particularly kind. It feels expansive and frightening, and it weighs on her. She’s trying to just let that be. She is trying, as Burke has urged her to try a hundred times, to simply acknowledge what she’s feeling, rather than bullying herself out of it. 

Right now, for example, her inner bully wants her to toughen up. It shouts inside her head until her ears ring that it’s five bodies instead of one, and so what? It sneers that she’s making this about her and her trauma, when there are five true innocents who’ve lost their lives. There are five devastated families who need her to suck it up and do her job. 

But she manages to make the bully stand down. She stops in the hallway on her way to the interrogation and presses her back against the abrasive brick wall. She pauses and lets the world feel wide. She lets herself be overwhelmed. She imagines her own failure and lets the sorrow of it all intrude on her heart. She feels the weight, and she moves on. 

It’s not all better when she does. The moment she’s taken to acknowledge that this is hard—it’s fucking hard—doesn’t grant her magical coping skills, but she feels connected to it. The fear of failure, the genuine grief for loss of life, the onerous weight of the work she has to do—they all feel like they belong to her, not to someone else. That’s the way it is too much of the time. Too much of the time, she—wraithlike—watches from high up in one corner of the room each time she runs into an emotion more complex than the annoyance born of a paper cut. 

She moves on, literally this time. She pushes off the wall and heads for observation and the last of the stories they need to gather. She pushes off the wall and transforms herself into the person who is not overwhelmed, who is not terrified and alone. She stops in the uncharacteristically open doorway. He is there, alone, and she’s not quite sure what happens to the world. 

In some ways, the world shrinks. There is the eternal magnetic pull between them and the wide world is really no match for it. But shrinking—that’s not quite what the world is doing right now. He’s struggling every bit as much as she is with the scope of this—with the terrifying expanse of it all. 

Mostly, the world shifts, it shakes itself out like a sand painting renewed. She takes a step toward him in the darkened room, and the wide world shifts. _You good?_ she asks, and he is not. He couldn’t be any more than she could be good right now. But these are the questions they ask—bad, superficial questions when the world is wide and terrifying. This is the way they pitch themselves forward through such horrors to do the work. 

The world shifts, and it’s not the teen romance reveal where that they see each other with new eyes. He has been looking at her, she has been looking at him exactly like this for such a long time now, it feels like a comfortable oasis amiss the chaos. None of this is new, but neither one of them looks away, even when she speaks and he speaks. The world is wide, and still there seems to be nowhere to run from this. They’ve filled up the wide world with everything they feel for one another—with history and psychic graffiti and baggage and pain, but also with hope and comfort. 

He is nice to come home to. That’s what this feels like in this stupid, cramped, foul-smelling room in which the two of them have spent an inordinate amount of time in together. It’s what she can imagine feeling wherever they are, whenever they are. She imagines the simplicity of his touch, an inane _Hi, honey, how was your day_? question to shut the door on whatever wide and terrifying world crumbling around their ears. He’ll be so entirely nice to come home to. 

He’ll have some elegant way to say this whether the wide world is burning or they find themselves, for once, in the eye of the hurricane. He’ll bring poetry into the equation, but it amounts to the same critical thing. Wherever they are, he’ll be so nice to come home to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: How much more not a thing can not a things get? This is such a rough stretch at a terrible rough time. Blegh. Sorry, 


	20. Basic—The Limey (4 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is Uncomplicated, Population: Him. He’s been away a long while, and it takes some arranging now. He flares with annoyance over that. He flares with something darker, but this is Uncomplicated, so he pushes that down, down, down. 

> _“What should I know about you?”  
>  — Nigel Wyndham, The Limey (4 x 20)_

* * *

This is Uncomplicated, Population: Him. He’s been away a long while, and it takes some arranging now. He flares with annoyance over that. He flares with something darker, but this is Uncomplicated, so he pushes that down, down, down. 

He has a preoccupied daughter, and that’s convenient, isn’t it? She is off at her sixteen new internships. She is off getting another taste of dorm life. She is not around to comment on his red-rimmed eyes or the questionable shirts, jackets, shoes he picked up in Vegas because he hadn’t even packed a bag. He has a preoccupied daughter for the moment, for not much longer. 

He has a mother who has finally wised up enough to make herself scarce. She’d tried patience, she’d tried aphorisms, she’d tried tough love and he’d walked out. He’d gotten in the Ferrari and hit the airport. He’d gone to Vegas without a bag. He has a mother—somewhere—who has almost certainly given up on him. 

He has an empty home, right here in Uncomplicated, Population: Him. 

He has work. He has the job he came to the twelfth precinct to do—one final book, and his purpose is renewed. He follows, he observes, he flexes his crime-solving muscles, he beats it the hell out of there. That’s how it is. That’s how it always was supposed to be, and it’s a damned shame he lost his way, wasted his time, made a fool of himself. It’s a damned shame, but that’s in the past. 

He has a Ferrari and a hangover that hasn’t _quite_ asserted itself yet. He has Jacinda riding shotgun and life is so perfect in Uncomplicated that he just hands over the keys. He doesn’t even have to think about where to park the damned car. 

He has the universe sending him signs left and right that Uncomplicated is the place to be. Everyone extends a warm welcome to Detective Inspector Full Frontal. Not a soul at the precinct—not a soul on the case—needs or wants him around, which frees him up for an uncomplicated lunch date, for a clutch-popping roar away from the precinct and a little hair of the dog. It really frees him up. 

He’s back, post–lunch date, because where else would he be? This is where he is when he feels like being there, and that’s his exact mood right now. He’s there to demonstrate his quick eye and his flair for narrative. He’s there to cobble together a madcap plan for securing the vital fingerprint that will allow them to move on their man. He is there to sow productive chaos and leave someone else—some chump who’s never been to Uncomplicated—with the clean up. 

He is not there to have his breath whisked off to parts unknown when she emerges between the irregular line of desks, an absolute vision in midnight. He is not there to have his heart lodge in his throat as her skittish, wounded gaze meets his, as though she hasn’t been egging him on for years, reveling in what a fool he’s been making of himself all the while. He is not here for any of this, but she’s the one who leaves on the arm of a man he’s just remembered is a sign from the universe that he is neither needed nor wanted here. 

He remembers that. He reads the signs and peals out again. He re-establishes his permanent residence in Uncomplicated over lobster, over pinot noir, over the details of the case, even though he’s not needed, he’s not wanted. But that’s too bad for them, because he’s the smartest kid in the room, wherever that room may be. He cracks the case— _Jacinda_ cracks the case, not Detective Inspector One of the Best, and there’s nothing in Articles of Incorporation for Uncomplicated that says he can’t stick around for a victory lap over that. 

It’s all he sticks around for, though, even when she trails after him, even when she wants to talk, even when he is dying to know that she wants to talk to him about. And that _is_ against the Articles of Incorporation, so he beats feet out of there. He pops the clutch and peels away. 

It’s the waning hours of the Jacinda Interlude, and he’s fine with that. She’s headed back to the skies and he’s headed back to his mostly empty home, and that’s how it goes in Uncomplicated, Population: Him. 

There’s a trail of clothing connecting the dots from the front door of the loft to the foot of his bed. There’s a questionable jacket, shirt, shoes. There is a body, face down on the bed and five days’ worth of a hangover asserting itself. 

This is Uncomplicated, Population: Him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A place, even metaphorical, cannot be a thing. 


	21. One and One—Headhunters (4 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She does not, in any real sense, believe her own bullshit about what’s happening with him. She trots it out for Lanie when Lanie’s idea of reassurance is This Flight Attendant, Too, Shall Pass. She makes her earnest, Real Talk face. She brings up the two divorces and rolls out her finishing move: Maybe that’s just who he is. That is the bullshit she does not actually believe. 

> _“What went down at the cemetery?”  
>  — Ethan Slaughter, Headhunters (4 x 21) _

* * *

She does not, in any real sense, believe her own bullshit about what’s happening with him. She trots it out for Lanie when Lanie’s idea of reassurance is _This Flight Attendant, Too, Shall Pass_. She makes her earnest, _Real Talk_ face. She brings up the two divorces and rolls out her finishing move: _Maybe that’s just who he is_. That is the bullshit she does not actually believe. 

But she circles back to it, again and again, because what other explanation is there? Other than the steady stream of explanations Burke has offered, of course. And it’s not that she’s dismissing those. She’s not embracing bullshit and wasting everybody’s time and tissues and armchair integrity when she’s just going to come around to believing _Maybe that’s just who he is_ bullshit again. 

She circles back, because alternative explanations are not exactly thick on the ground. The combined forces of Lanie and Burke have fallen short, and she is left without any sense of the _why_ of this—the inciting incident. 

_Tired of waiting_ is the best that Lanie has to offer, and there’s some deep-seated, self-loathing part of herself that thinks things are exactly that simple. When she gives in to it—when she succumbs to the siren song of her back-up bullshit, Burke tells her she wasn’t waiting, she was _healing._ Her eyes roll so hard she can see things directly behind her without moving her head. Healing doesn’t mean a damned thing if she’s walking around the world, all perfectly healed, and she never got her shot with him. They never got their shot together. 

It’s all beside the point anyway. Lanie’s Waiting Game Theory is based on partial information. He didn’t go from _I love you_ to tired of waiting in such a short time. She knows that. She _knows,_ but she’d give almost anything to have someone, to have—let’s face it— _Lanie_ reassure her that he couldn’t possibly have waited three long years, finally told her, and gotten bored in the interim. But Lanie, who almost certainly _would_ tell her this is not in a position to. Lanie does not have all the facts. No one can have all the facts, except Burke, and the guilt she feels for having told even him is incapacitating at times. Her therapist shouldn’t be—should never have been—the first one to hear the truth from her mouth. 

That’s bullshit, too, though. It’s bullshit number three to wallow in the guilt about what she has and hasn’t done. She doesn’t have a time machine. She cannot go back and tell him from her ICU bed that she heard him. She cannot even go back to the book signing—to the swings—and confess. But wallowing is convenient. It’s another stall tactic that keeps her from the mystery before her, the one that it seems urgent lately that she solve. 

Slaughter doesn’t fit bullshit number one—Slaughter is not a busty, uncomplicated flight attendant or otherwise a candidate for accompanying him through some drive-through chapel of love. He _could_ fit with the Waiting Game Theory—bullshit number two. He could simply be the new shiny thing in front of him, and he could just be bored with her, investigatively speaking, but she doesn’t think so. Her churning, miserable gut tells her it’s something different. It tells her that Slaughter is a death wish, whether Castle realizes it or not—he is some kind alternative to whatever turmoil he’s in, and she doesn’t know whether to root for stupid or self-destructive there.

Except, of course, she does know. She wants stupid to be the answer—his or hers, she honestly doesn’t care anymore. She just wants whatever the damned _why_ is here to announce itself. She wants them to be handcuffed together and tiger adjacent. She wants to be locked in a trunk with him, no panic button pressed. She wants to be on a couch in a ridiculously upscale LA suite with precious little left in the room service bottle of wine. She wants to be in any one of a hundred times and places where she could talk to him and he’d have no alternative but to listen. 

She has no idea what she’d say. She doesn’t know if she’d just yell at him for some solid stretch of time, doing violence to his ear, his nose, and the one spot on his chest her index finger reliably finds every single time. She doesn’t know if, God forbid, she’d cry—if she’d sob unintelligible questions about how he could do this to her, about how she thought they had an understanding. 

She doesn’t know if she’d tell him straight off that she remembers, or if she might skip way ahead and say it back. She doesn’t know if she _did_ say it back, if her stupid emotionally stunted brain might attach caveats and disclaimers—if he’d laugh and fold his arms around her and tell her that it’s okay. She doesn’t know if he’d kiss the tear tracks streaking her cheeks and tell her that disclaimers are okay, as long as they’re together. 

She doesn’t know what would happen if she had the chance to make whatever this is right. She doesn’t know how any of this would go down if she had the faintest idea what the _why_ of all this is. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Beckett is awash in a sea of no things. 


	22. Cogito Erto—Undead Again (4 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has a lot to think about. He has not been big on thinking these last few weeks, and apparently it’s like pile of laundry that you forgot you left heaped in the middle of the bed until you’re exhausted and would like nothing more than to get into said bed, but you can’t: There’s a pile of laundry heaped in the middle of it. The things he hasn’t been thinking about are almost exactly like that. 

> _“And why do you think that is?”_   
>  _— Martha Rodgers, Undead Again (4 x 22)_

* * *

He has a lot to think about. He has not been big on thinking these last few weeks, and apparently it’s like pile of laundry that you forgot you left heaped in the middle of the bed until you’re exhausted and would like nothing more than to get _into_ said bed, but you can’t: There’s a pile of laundry heaped in the middle of it. The things he hasn’t been thinking about are almost exactly like that. 

Some of them are things he was destined to kick down the road until he ran out of road. His kid’s impending decision, and the obvious truth that she’s intent on not just leaving the nest, but launching herself as far from it as possible. In every version of the multiverse, that’s a thing he was not going to think about, only now he has to think about the fact that he’s left her to face all that alone. 

He’s been so obviously fragile and empty-headed, so obviously in denial, that she’s been suffering through it all without the person who’s always promised he’d be with her in everything. He has to think about the ways he’s let her down and the worry that he’ll live with from now on that the sick feeling she’s had about Oxford, about Stanford, have been about what he needs, not what she wants. 

He has to think about the things his mother has been trying to tell him for weeks. He has to sit with the one thing—the _one_ —that had somehow, finally pierced the carapace he’d constructed around himself. _If you want to punish Beckett …_

He has to think long and hard about that. 

He _had_ wanted to punish her. Punishing her has been high up on his wish list since the bombing case. He’s wanted to punish her with his absence, then punish her with his presence, absence, presence, absence. He has wanted her to have to worry about when he’d show up, who he’d show up with, what nonsense he might pull. He has wanted her to feel unsteady and unsure of him. He has to think about the fact that the epiphany with his mother was more than a little manufactured, because of course he had wanted to punish her. 

He has to think about the fact that has believed—he has held the truth in the center of his mind—that he couldn’t punish her. He has believed that he’d been mistaken in thinking that he had any power whatsoever to do that, and a hot-off-the-presses thing to think about is how pathetic that makes him—how desperate and sub–John Hughes everything with Jacinda, everything with Slaughter, everything with making himself unpredictably scarce and chaotically present.

But what he has to think about most is the fact that he _has_ punished her. He has that power and he has wielded it in such harmful, painful ways. He has to think about the fact that she is not innocent here—she’d punished him for months after her shooting, and she has _hurt_ him by dealing in allusions and subtext and sins of omission—but he doesn’t care. 

It’s the strangest of the things he has to think about. He does not _care_ about whatever culpability she bears for their estrangement. He is hurt, he is angry, his faith in her is badly bruised, and he still wishes fervently that he hadn’t tried to punish her. He wishes fervently that he had not succeeded. 

He takes her bravery for granted. That’s another thing to think about. He is all in when it comes to the stoic, badass persona she inhabits on the job. He would collect her action figure, if in fact the action figures she so richly deserves were a thing in the real world. He has seen her stare down, disarm, take down the fools who underestimate her at their own peril. He has witnessed her wading into the most heartbreaking, most baffling, most desolate and emotional situations without so much as a muscle twitch that might convey anxiety, weakness, impatience.

From here into eternity, he will have to think about the moment she showed him exactly how brave she is not sometimes, exactly how brave she believes she has failed to be these last few months. And yet she has been in therapy. All this time she has been in therapy, working on that wall in isolation because that’s who she is, because he told her when he came back that he was still mad, because she is dumb and stubborn and _unthinking_ sometimes. 

And she probably has a metaphorical pile of laundry heaped in the middle of her bed, just like he does. She’s probably had that there for months, just like he has. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I defy anyone to argue that thinking is a thing in the year of our lizard, 2020


	23. Nautilus—Always (4 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her confessions, from the beginning, proceeded in tight, tiny spirals that resemble nothing so much as the Yellow Brick Road. She came to her first therapist sleep-deprived and half-starved. Obsession, they had mutually decided, was the problem—the entirety of her college years aiming toward the academy, toward homicide, toward autonomy to pursue her mother’s killers to the ends of the earth. In her down time she tried to slay her father’s dragons. She’d convinced herself that anything less was the gravest insult to her mother’s memory. 

> _“So that leaves you with what?”_   
>  _— Vincente Delgado, Always (4 x 23)_

* * *

Her confessions, from the beginning, proceeded in tight, tiny spirals that resemble nothing so much as the Yellow Brick Road. She came to her first therapist sleep-deprived and half-starved. Obsession, they had mutually decided, was the problem—the entirety of her college years aiming toward the academy, toward homicide, toward autonomy to pursue her mother’s killers to the ends of the earth. In her down time she tried to slay her father’s dragons. She’d convinced herself that anything less was the gravest insult to her mother’s memory. 

She left her first therapist with a switch thrown, a door slammed and padlocked from the outside, with years of her life utterly torched, their remains buried at a crossroads to keep their restless spirits from following her. She’d left her first therapist nowhere near the outer spiral that would have cut across the border of Munchkin City. 

And then he had come crashing into her life and the next confessions came—they had revealed themselves, really, not least of all to her. These were confessions not so easy to categorize. Fury certainly led the way, cold and implacable fury that, itself, hid behind an it’s-the-principle-of-the-thing argument. In her absolute isolation that first summer, this was her mantra—that it should not have mattered one bit if he reasons for leaving behind her mother’s murder were good, bad or indifferent. She— _she_ —had made the decision to leave it behind and his utter disrespect for that more than justified the fury. 

Beyond that fury, though, was misery rattling its bones in the dark. It was more by accident than design that tough love and the Al-Anon way were an appropriate response to her father’s addiction, and later, his recovery; her abandonment of her mother’s case had accomplished nothing. 

Obsession had come roaring back that second summer. If she’d had the mental or emotional space to devote to it, she might have wondered about the Yellow Brick Roundabout, the Yellow Brick Cul de Sac, the Yellow Brick Dead Fucking End. If there had been anyone to confess to that second summer—that third summer during the sliver each day she wasn’t knocked out by pain or painkillers or both—she might have bored herself to tears with the epic retread. 

Burke was a fresh start. Working with him was supposed to be a fresh start on a less garish, more sensible path, but it’s been the Yellow Brick Road all over again. It’s been Things to Do in Munchkinland when You’re Emotionally Dead, with her showing up in the first instance to enable her obsession and get back on the job, in the second to confess to obsession all over again, in the third to confess, finally, to the sheer scale of her obsession and to take stock of all the things it had kept, it has kept, it does keep her from having for years—joy, proper mourning, friendship, companionship. Love. 

But this—even this confession—turns out to be a Yellow Brick Switchback. Her meek declaration that she wants to be more, her earnest conviction that she was ready at last to try, all her apparently noble intentions have turned out to be cover for a monster thirteen years and who knows how many confessions in the making. One address, one connection and it comes roaring forth. 

She knows it. She has always known its ugliness, its cruelty. She has, after all, been the one responsible for its care and feeding all this time. She has lived with it lurking in the raw, ribbon-sliced sections of her soul that have never healed—that she has never allowed to heal, knowing this day would come when Marisol Castañeda or someone like her would stand in her way and she would need it, this festering, ferocious, merciless beast. 

She has always known, she has never confessed, she has nurtured this. She has secretly nurtured exactly this, and still there is a part of her beating its fists against the door, when the beast reverses field and takes control. There is a part of her—the true her that travels the Yellow Brick Road in a spiraling path of tiny, arduous steps— that tries to rise up from the ashes scattered at a crossroads. 

It is the part of her that falls quiet, however briefly, at the disgust in his voice— _Beckett, that’s enough_. It’s the part of her that feels shame at such a profound betrayal of everything she has been in her professional life—everything she has been in the world since her mother was murdered. It’s the part of her that aches so miserably and throbs with fear at every lacerating word between them when he comes to make confessions of his own.

* * *

There may be a moment her future when she rolls her eyes at this—the sheer melodrama of her remaking. A stock footage near-death experience. She may laugh it off or deny it with vigor that events transpired in that way at all. She may forbid him—absolutely _forbid_ him—from telling the damned story all over again, making the rooftop higher and higher each time, reducing the number of fingers she was holding on by until they’re well into negative territory. 

There may be a moment when it will seem as though the realization that has set her life on a genuinely new course has arrived in practically unbelievable fashion, but for now, excitement ripples through her like vibration across a drum skin as she imagines forbidding him anything—it ripples through her as she imagines him. 

She is annoyed by all the things standing in her way, all the boxes she has to tick before she can go to him and confess, go to him and beg forgiveness, go to him and make the case that she is transformed—that the woman he has waited patiently for has arrived at last. 

She is annoyed by Gates and the theater of handing over gun, then badge, though It does pluck at mightily uncomfortable things. As she fingers the raised numbers on her gold shield, she imagines Marisol Castañeda’s terror hiding behind her fury, her toughness, her practicality, her survival instinct. Her vision comes, for a moment, in black and red blocks as though the heaving bulk of the dying monster within her is stealing one last look at the world. She—the actual she just emerging, blinking, into the light—punctuates its death rattle with another bit of melodrama. 

_Keep it. I resign_. 

It’s a a huge, sweeping gesture accompanied by the satisfying _thonk_ of the heavy badge landing on the wood of the Captain’s desk. It is a hard and irrevocable turn that she has just taken off this godforsaken Yellow Brick Road, and it sends another drum ruffle of excitement tingling over her skin. 

There are more annoying tasks. There is her desk, her personal things, and the staples of a life lived right her for more than eighty per cent of the time since the beginning, since Obsession Phase #1. There is her gym bag, which smells even more rank than she remembers it, but it’s what she has on hand, and so in go the elephants, her tiny candy dish, the one or two photos she has tucked away. 

There is a trip home and a costume change. There are more costume changes than she will ever, ever, _ever_ admit to, and then there is a pilgrimage. 

It is here that she has been as honest as she could be, within the limits of her traumatized soul. It’s here that she finally admitted to herself how essential he is to her life. It is her that she made clear her intention to live—to really live. 

She half expects him to walk up and wrap his strong hands around the chains of the swing next to hers. She half expects him to drop into the seat and start pumping his legs, disappearing into the thick bank of fog on the arc of his ascent, coming back into view as their swings draw side by side. She half expects herself to lean over and confess that she’d fantasized—she had fully imagined—those hands being the ones to pull her up and back into the real world. 

He doesn’t appear in the moment, of course. She has to go to him. She has to make a beginning, and that is more than fine. It’s as it should be, though she’s impatient with the logistics—with the unanswered phone and the door man who does not seem at all confident that this drowned rat of a woman has _Go right up, Detective_ privileges. _Go right up, Ms. Beckett_ —she tries it on for size, even though she’s flat out impatient now. 

Still she swims the moat and scales the battlements. She _arrives_ and realizes that she might fail at this. Tonight, in this doorway, she might fail. She entertains the possibility for the first time and it seems all too real. The monster may simply have done too much damage. He may never be able to trust. She may never be able to trust. 

It is a possibility, terrifying and heartbreaking. It is infuriating and possible. It is a possible outcome for the here and now, but it changes nothing. 

She has come to confess at last, and it’s as if he knows already. It’s as if he has memorized the lines and she knows hers by a new-made heart. 

_You. I just want you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Things that aren’t things cancel out things. It’s math, which is not a thing. 


End file.
